It’s been happening for a while now: people have been moving out of traditional office setups and are instead choosing to operate on the go. From cafes, coworking spaces, and homes to client offices, more and more companies are open to having their employees operate remotely. How then, does one keep a track of what, where and how much work is getting done? A WhatsApp group or a flurry of emails might seem like the most likely response. But are they as effective as being able to assign tasks and keeping a track of them as and when they are completed?
It was to address these very issues that city-based entrepreneurs Bharath T Rameash and Kishan Sakhuja decided to launch Worqa. Short for Work, Question and Answers, Worqa is a workflow management app and web portal best suited for small and medium businesses (SMBs).
The duo comes from a strong digital marketing background and had been partners for a long time, before they decided to launch Worqa. “It’s not your typical straight out of college startup. Both Kishan and I have our own businesses and Worqa was born out of the problems we ourselves faced in our enterprises,” says Rameash. The idea, he says was to address a real problem and provide a solution to it, adding that the duo had launched Instellar Tech, a cloud computing company back in 2015. “But the idea for Worqa is something we’d been working on since 2016. As an SMB, we ourselves were on the lookout for an effective workflow management system and found that they didn’t work as well. We took the time to understand the products out there, understand how they work; there was a lot of research that went into developing Worqa before we finally launched it in January 2018,” he explains.
During the course of their research, they found that a lot of companies were typically using either WhatsApp or Gmail to coordinate with team members, assign tasks, track if they’d been completed etc. “The question this raised was why were people not using softwares that were readily available. What we realised was that this was probably because nobody was actually building software for the non-techies, who don’t understand them. That was our starting point: software that was easy and yet effective,” says Rameash, adding, “Worqa is essentially a team work management software meant for SMBs and it’s ideal for small teams as well.”
The app, which can be used by up to ten members in an organisation for free on a trial basis, lets people assign tasks, keep a track of which of these have been completed, and communicate with team mates. It also features an HR plug in to manage attendance and office check ins. Since it is geo-based, people operating from remote locations can also log attendance from wherever they’re located without having to physically swipe in and out of office. “Some of our clients include tech companies. Logistics companies, media houses, retailers and pharma companies,” says Rameash, adding that in the two months since their launch they’ve had around 280 corporates sign up to use Worqa.
Given that there is no dearth of similar workflow management apps and systems in the market, how does Worqa plan to beat competition? “We firmly believe that if there is competition then there is business. You don’t have to be the first to be the best. Our approach is not to take a unique problem, but to provide a simple yet unique solution to a problem,” says Rameash, adding, “The advantage with Worqa is that it is simple enough to be used by just about anyone: even housekeeping staff and chauffeurs. We’ve added value by subtracting features and keeping it less complex.”
