How Teamgage’s new COVID-19 tool won over 1,200 users in three days

Husband and wife team Ben and Noelle Smit launched Teamgage commercially in 2016 from Adelaide and the company has since been adopted by Australian state and national organisations including Santos, SA Water, Telstra and Westpac as well as the New South Wales and South Australian governments.

The South Australian startup’s success has been in its digital employee engagement process, which allows users to submit anonymous feedback on a 20-second interface via a range of customisable metrics such as workload, safety, manager relations and fulfilment. The feedback is added ahead of regular team meetings where it is reviewed by staff.

Last month, Teamgage launched a new survey and analysis tool to its platform: the Ready to Use solution.

Noelle Smit said the Ready to Use solution was developed in response to the coronavirus and had been added by 1,200 new users within three days of the product launching.

She said the business’ latest technology allowed companies to ensure staff were productive, engaged and their wellbeing was supported while working from home using metrics including communication, leader support and remote working. Through the new metrics, teams were able to make improvements based on the data.

“We’ve got whole workforces now faced with managing a workforce they can’t see. They can’t go in and just check in the way they used to do it. Some managers are managing teams they can’t see today and they’re not sure how they’re going,” Smit said.

“So we put together some metrics that could support teams who were now remote to look at what’s working and what isn’t, and how they could change the way they’re working together, given these new conditions.”

Smit said while Teamgage adapted its software for organisations looking to gather data quickly and efficiently during the pandemic, the company was also looking to fine-tune its services for use in international markets.

She said while the company’s technology was being used in countries including the US, Asia and New Zealand, Teamgage was exploring how it needed to adapt for those with more complicated structures and working environments.

“The nature of what Teamgage does is fairly high processing of data, which we need to be able to do at speed. We also need to host data across different regions,” Smit said.

“There are some complexities that we need to build out in the backend of our product to make that really simple and fast for our clients on the front end … such as technical requirements around general data protection regulation.

“For example, a lot of Australian clients, especially in government and universities, require data to be hosted in Australia and not to be sent offshore and there are other, similar requirements, for other regions.”

A $350,000 South Australian state government research, commercialisation and startup fund grant will help Teamgage expand its international presence in the American, Asian and European markets “in a more concerted way” within 18 months.

“For us at Teamgage, in our first three years, we were really focusing on the Australian market, and growing and gaining traction here, locally, and that’s part of how 40 Under 40 helped us,” Smit said.

“I think at the time, when I won, we had very few clients in Adelaide — by far the majority were in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.

“Since then, we’ve acquired a lot more clients locally and I think that’s simply because a lot of businesses didn’t know about us and 40 Under 40 really raised Teamgage’s profile in the state.

“Now we’ve hit a point where some of our customers are global and so there’s an appetite to look at how we can export Teamgage from here.”

This article was first published by The Lead.

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