Ax'21 - Smoother collaboration can grow a company’s bottom line by thousands of euros per employee

August 16, 2021
Written by 
Jukka Rautiainen
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Soft skills are clearly an emerging megatrend. The message is very clear no matter whose report you read: McKinsey’s, Deloitte’s, World Economic Forum’s or any other top consultancy’s or think-tank’s. In the new world of work, broad social skills are becoming ever so important. 

Research tells us that the average cost of poor teamwork is around €3,500/employee, and that there are a few crucial teamwork skills all teams should master in order to be sustainably high-performing:

Therefore, all forward-looking team leaders should focus their efforts on ensuring that active and continuous development of these skills is well-embedded in their team’s culture and ways of working.

However, teamwork skills are very hard to learn only by reading books or practicing individually, and companies don’t really have scalable tools to support their teams work smoother together. Random pulse surveys rarely deliver measurable impact on team behavior, and although team coaching can be very effective, it is a pricey high-end service which ultimately cannot be scaled up to all teams in a larger organization.

We at TeamFluent strive to solve this problem with a research based, easy-to-use mobile tool for improving teamwork skills together in real-life situations at workplaces. Our software-as-a-service based solution leverages the best of both worlds, combining elements from scalable, low-cost pulse surveys with in-depth reflection and concrete development advice previously available only through participating in a team coaching process. 

Our novel approach enables any team to flexibly choose the most important skills for them from an evidence-based repository, and to use experience sampling for repeatedly evaluating team behaviors in real collaboration situations. The team gets to discuss important data on their strengths and weaknesses, and make changes to their work practices based on their reflection. Furthermore, they learn new methods for developing teamwork skills and practices by receiving concrete advice. We’re also building support for internal and external benchmarking of your team against other teams in TeamFluent.

It has been really great to see the enthusiasm on the market, and we’re very much looking forward to launching the first official version of the application. 

We believe our science-based and novel solution truly makes a difference in improving team performance and psychological safety by driving better collaboration and communication, and hope to hear from potential investors who would be interested in participating in our seed round of €200k.


Kiuas Ax'21 questions


Who or what inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

After a career in corporate world, entrepreneurship appeared as exciting, challenging and inspiring; something different for a change (I know this is a lame answer, though).

If you would get 10 billion euros right now, what would you do?

Invest in our seed round, of course, and in other startups. And find a high-impact charity.

Who is your favorite superhero?

Whoever is the first person character in Minecraft. That dude can do pretty much everything!

If you could change just one thing in the world, what would it be?

To make everyone in the world always try to see and understand other person’s point of view first, before judging them. Narrow-mindedness fuels extremism and fanaticism, which in turn lead to all kinds of evil stuff.

Main course at dinner, choose: a) Monkey brains with devils sauce and baby vegetables, b) lab grown steak from human cells and béarnaise with crispy fries, c) Organically grown Nepenthes Truncata salad, including tomatoes, sweet blue peppers and glowing mushrooms with a small chance to kill you instantly.

I’d go for monkey brains, mostly for the sauce.

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