Guy Labaki, an Analyst at BY Venture Partners, is proud to say that his team is a major SoWork advocate and power user. Why? We asked, and he told:
“SoWork gives us visibility on the availability of our teammates, while being super easy to use,” says Guy. But, navigating the challenges of staying connected in a remote work world wasn’t always this easy for Guy and his team.
As they are distributed across across four different countries and multiple timezones, visualizing teammate availability is incredibly important to BYVP. Before discovering SoWork, the team tried the usual collaboration tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. “We needed a tool that could help us manage our geographical distribution while still being easy to use - specifically, to initiate contact. Other tools required constantly sending links and invitations and edits and reschedules, meaning they weren’t the best options in terms of efficiency.” Guy would send out meeting invites and then spend a lot of time waiting and following up, ultimately derailing his productivity. It’s a very familiar story to most of us.
Video meetings in SoWork are as simple as walking up to a teammate with your avatar
That’s one of the ways their SoWork Smart Office comes into play. When Guy needs to video chat with a teammate in SoWork, he simply walks up to them. If his teammate is in working hours, they will instantly initiate an automatic video call. From there, Guy and his colleague not only have all of the meeting tools you’d expect - screen share, recordings, blurred backgrounds, and more - but they even have their own Smart Office AI Assistant to generate a world-class summary of their meeting. They can then simply send that to other teammates or external colleagues. It all comes together seamlessly for Guy and his team, which makes their work-life easy. “All we need to do is just walk up to someone and start the conversation! It really couldn’t be better!”
“The way interactions happen in SoWork is what makes it special. SoWork compels you to connect with your teammates and eliminates the feeling of being isolated from them. And it makes everything more fun.” - Guy Labaki
Similar to most teams, fun was never synonymous with online productivity for Guy and his team. But since adopting SoWork, things have changed. Guy recounted a situation where, during a meeting in his team’s virtual office, a colleague’s daughter virtually tapped him on the shoulder unannounced. “Dad, it’s unfair that you get to play all day long while we have to go to school!“, she exclaimed, pointing out SoWork’s vibrant art style and customizable office themes. Guy laughed as he told us the story. “Even today, it’s a hard task to convince her that SoWork is where all the work gets done! It really feels like something special is being built here. We’re really excited to see what you do next.”
We can’t help but agree.