Inspiration
We've been a remote work for more than 5 years. We started DailyBot as a company to help remote workers collaborate better, feel more connected and motivated about work.
When the Covid-19 started to spread, we as a team decided to start a self quarantine and started helping some companies by sharing tips about remote work. Even though we're a small team, we started running internal surveys with our team in order check how every person was feeling, in terms of health, anxiety, etc. In order to know whether someone in our team needed help or just some one to talk.
Based on this experience, we decided to hack during these days in order to extend our current product DailyBot, in order to integrate ways to have these mental health checks and Covid-19 check-ins integrated, and help remote workers all over the world.
Problem
Working remotely can be challenging and having a team in sync usually takes time in meetings, calls and people should keep asking each other about status and progress. Mood and motivation is hard to track when you don't see people often, monitoring or understanding whether the team members are healthy, physically or mentally is not a simple job.
This problem applies to anyone working from home, from business to education.
What it does
DailyBot is a chatbot that integrates into chat platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Hangouts Chat. It helps teams get daily status reports and runs daily standup meetings to keep team members in sync. DailyBot can also track motivation/mood and it shares reports to the managers.
The Solution we built during this hackathon enhances DailyBot by providing:
- A way to run Covid-19 health checks with team members
- A way to run mental health check-ins with any member of the team
DailyBot can get in touch with every person of a remote team and ask few questions, then share these questions with some person in the company, or with entire teams; those responses can be very private or even anonymous, and the reports can be automated to be posted in channels inside Slack, Microsoft Teams or Hangouts.
How we built it
We talked to doctors in order to build a 6 key questions check-in for Covid-19 that we could enable inside our product, we introduced it to DailyBot, also another 4 questions check-in around mental health that could help monitor team' mental health status, as the current version of DailyBot didn't offer all what we needed for this in terms of privacy customization and anonymity then we had to hack some features:
- A way for the user to decide whether the responses should be anonymous or not
- A way to configure the privacy, who can read or access this information
- A way to give some hints about good hygene practices (as reminders) when the user completes a report
These new features and the right questions are the important part to hack, we can then benefit from our platform to rely on it to automate these questions as regular check-ins that remote workers can complete in a regular basis, from wherever they are.
The great part is that, as DailyBot already integrates into chat channels, it becomes very comfortable for a person to reply to few questions in Slack, etc, even by using the mobile phone.
Challenges we ran into
It was very little time to change our platform and release source code to our production system, as we already have customers we needed to introduce the changes in a solid way.
The most complicated was to introduce the strong privacy controls for the information as we needed to modify many pieces in our architecture, but we did it, our team was up until 3-4 am from Friday to Sunday and made it happen!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The fact of introducing these kind of health check-ins on top of a product that is already useful for remote workers is the first point to be proud of.
Our team also feels very accomplished by how we managed to pursue this project internally and complete the release by meeting deadlines, as mentioned, it wasn't easy at all to adapt some pieces of our platform.
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