With 65 people in their virtual office, SciLeads is an Irish tech company with employees across North America and the UK, helping life science and biopharma companies with leads globally, to accelerate sales and drive growth. As remote-first from the beginning, SciLeads had been using various communication tools throughout the years and started to use Teemyco after the virtual office they’d used previously had been discontinued.
Rob Rees is Head of People & Culture, Rachel Lively is Marketing Content Manager at SciLeads.
Teemyco stood out due to its simple yet clear design. We liked that you could see the whole layout of the office on one screen as well as everyone in it. We could design the rooms however we wanted and make it our own. You could clearly see if someone is available and you could talk to them immediately. As we knew a virtual office would be a crucial part of our culture, we put in a lot of consideration and Teemyco seemed like the best option.
In general, it’s our common workspace for all different teams. People log into the office to show their availability and then also have their meetings there. You can see teams in their standups or having spontaneous one-to-ones, people get to interact with each other whenever it’s needed.
They can provide announcements when everybody’s attention is needed or show appreciation by sending out kudos hats.
Especially when growing, there are people you’d never interact with or even see besides those big planned meetings. With a virtual office, you feel like you get to participate in the same environment and feel a lot more connected within the company overall. Even with the colleagues you don’t work with daily.
Improves the onboarding experience
As we have a lot of new staff, it’s great for us to have a training room, where people can go through the experience of being onboarded, talk to each other face to face and at the same time not be excluded from the rest of the team, as they can always see what goes around them during the day.
A lot of our employees come to us straight out of university and are used to a social, vibrant environment. Sometimes it’s the first time for them working remotely, so it’s great to provide a space where they can interact with everyone in the team and provide them with insights on how others work and have the conversations around it.
Some of us don’t feel like they need all that social interaction, and it’s great that the virtual office can provide that option too. You can always choose to stay available but out of a live chit chat until you’re needed for a call.
Our teams attend many trade shows which can require a lot of support from different staff. Whenever we see our trade team at their table and have time, we can just pop in and ask what is needed for the upcoming show, which ends up being so much faster than emails or going back and forth on Slack. It empowers us to be even more proactive and agile.
We can also see how when we used to work remotely in other businesses, without a virtual office, the relationships were so much more formal. Being able to visualize everyone, hop into spontaneous conversations and have this space where we’re all together, helps to remove those barriers.
As our team is in multiple continents, prior to virtual office it would be a headache to stay aware of the different time zones. Now it helps our Canadian team integrate better with our team in the UK. When we see someone from our Canadian team log in, we’re reminded that it’s probably a good time to prioritise certain work that impacts them, so it’s smoother collaboration all in all.
Would definitely recommend it to companies like ours. Being fully remote, the virtual office has been invaluable to keep everyone in touch. Especially teams that are international. But even hybrid teams, if they have some people working from home and others from the office, we can see how they’d benefit from having the common space that unites everyone.