Our investment in Time is Ltd — employee productivity in the new normal

How organisations manage their workforces has changed forever. Time is Ltd brings to market the next generation of employee productivity analytics to give managers data driven human capital insights.

We are delighted to participate in Time is Ltd’s oversubscribed €4.7m Seed raise, joining existing investors Chalfen Ventures and Accel.

Where is everyone?

The world of work has fundamentally changed in the past 12 months. In most countries, busy business districts and bustling offices have been quiet wastelands as the pandemic forced large parts of the workforce to work remotely. While the situation is improving in some parts of the world and people are emerging from this year-long homebound isolation — few expect that offices will return to what they were prior to the pandemic. Employee surveys conducted around the world show a clear preference for more flexible working arrangements. BCG found 89% of respondents to a 200,000+ person study now expect to be able to work from home. Employers have largely also considered remote working a success.

Hybrid work models

Across industries, firms have announced their plans for the future of work. A hybrid model that retains some flexibility of remote working while bringing people back to the office when required has been the preferred route of many organisations. Financial services have been no different. In March 2021, Jane Fraser, CEO at Citi, announced that there would be three models of working once a return to the office was deemed safe:

• Hybrid: Roles that will allow work from home up to two days per week.
• Resident: Roles that must be performed onsite.
• Remote: Roles that can be performed fully offsite.

Citi isn’t alone. While not all banks have embraced hybrid work models, other major banks have made similar announcements. HSBC is planning to cut 40% of it’s office space and move to hybrid work arrangements and Standard Chartered will offer up to 90% of it’s staff more flexible work arrangements by 2023.

This new way of working requires C-suite & management to rethink how their teams are managed. Without being in the office, it’s difficult to know how employees are working. Many firms have implemented monitoring tools on their devices that track a user’s behaviour — analysing how much time is spent on productivity applications. This has made analytics the fastest growing segment in this sector. It is expected that the market will grow 14.2% CAGR between 2020 and 2027 to $6.3bn.

“I was suddenly blind to how my staff were interacting.” — 1,000 employee scale-up CEO

From employee monitoring to human capital insights

We don’t believe that closely monitoring employee actions correlates to improved productivity (it is equivalent to having a boss hovering over your desk at work), and more importantly well-being or engagement of a firm’s employees. In our conversations with talent leaders, there was a reckoning that understanding employee interactions with a lens of engagement and belonging were the key drivers to a productive workforce. Unsurprisingly, these metrics were also important when it came to attracting and retaining top talent.

Time is Ltd

By analysing the “breadcrumbs” (or metadata) left by users on digital communication channels such as email, chat and video conferencing, the team at Time is Ltd provides managers a data-driven approach to understanding interactions in their firms.

These insights are combined with actions for managers to increase the engagement and collaboration within their teams. For example, a cohort analysis showed that after 6 months at a firm, new joiners that were onboarded remotely had networks half the size of their in-person counterparts. This impacted productivity as people hadn’t built relationships with other team members to collaborate effectively. A more structured one-on-one meeting schedule was suggested as a way to build these networks remotely.

Firms have an amazing opportunity in front of them to define how the future of work will shape their working practices. Here at Illuminate, we believe that a focus on human capital insights will be the winning strategy.

Backing an extraordinary team

We were immediately impressed with the founders’ ability to create a new category of solutions and sell into both large and medium sized firms. The three co-founders complement each other with unique skillsets and experiences. Jan Rezab, the firm’s CEO, brings a lifetime passion for data & analytics — having founded and built SocialBakers, a social media analytics firm with over 2,500 customers which was bought by Astute last year. Cyril Hoschl, CTO, is the tech mastermind behind their unique SocioMapping collaboration analytics tool. And finally Ulf Zetterberg, CRO, who recently sold his previous business SealSoftware to DocuSign, brings with him strong enterprise sales capabilities.

We are excited to partner with the Time is Ltd team going after a large and underserved market which we believe will be a critical driver of organisational competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Our financial services partners have already started engaging with the business and we look forward to supporting the business with their go-to-market in our sector.