Micah Remley, CEO of Robin, signs into work every day with a purpose.
“We are on a mission to enable people to have their best day of work ever,” he told Built In.
Since its founding in 2014, Robin has focused on maximizing the potential of office spaces with software that maps usage in real time and enables teams to book desks and spaces, providing data and analytics to ensure that the physical office is enhancing its employee experience. As the landscape of the workplace has shifted, though, Robin’s strategy has as well. Now, its mission is best served by building technology that supports a hybrid work environment.
“Hybrid work is hard,” Remley said. “We all know what it’s like to commute an hour into the office to find that no one else is there, or just to spend the entire day on Zoom calls. It’s very difficult to exist in two states — virtual and in-person — so most people just choose one, and that has largely been remote.”
Robin uses its mastery of the office to make the in-person option more appealing. With its software, employees can reserve desks in advance of coming in, and see who else has done the same, ensuring that they reap the social benefits of a communal workspace — and it’s getting results.
“We have found that companies drive 2.5 times more people into the office by deploying our software,” said Remley. “Employees can easily navigate hybrid work and spend in-person time with their co-workers in a productive environment.”
In his conversation with Built In, Remley spoke in more detail about the challenges and opportunities of hybrid work — and why Robin’s team-oriented culture makes it well equipped to tackle them.
What role did you play in developing and launching Robin’s software? What tools or technologies did your team use to build Robin’s software and why?
We tackle the problem of hybrid work with an unrelenting focus on an amazing user experience in an easy-to-use product. We deliver on that promise by utilizing a modern cloud architecture that utilizes technology to solve for the challenges of hybrid work. To make it easy for employees to use our solution, we integrate deeply into the tools that they use every day — Microsoft Office and Outlook, Teams, Google Workspace and Slack — which allows them to have seamless experience between virtual tools and in-person time.
What obstacles did you encounter along the way? How did you successfully overcome them?
Constant changes in attitude around in-person work versus remote work is a big obstacle, but also an opportunity. We believe that people perform at their best when they have a bit of both in-person and remote work, and recent Harvard research backs this up. We stay focused on solving the hybrid problem at Robin, and that drive is what allows us to overcome short-term obstacles. We put a huge emphasis on teamwork and creative problem solving, and I have found that our team has been able to tackle any and all of the challenges that have been thrown at us so far.
What teams did you collaborate with in order to get this across the finish line?
We have a deeply collaborative environment. Every employee I talk to remarks about the amazing amount of teamwork at Robin; it’s what sets the company apart from other organizations they’ve worked at. I think the fact that we are mission-driven to create tools that drive in-person collaboration is why a culture of team-first is so deeply ingrained in our organization.
“We stay focused on solving the hybrid problem at Robin, and that drive is what allows us to overcome short-term obstacles.”
When you think of other companies in your industry, how does Robin compare when it comes to how you build and launch new products?
I love the creativity that our team brings to the product development process.
We launched a paradigm-shifting feature a few months ago called workweek that allows hybrid employees to easily plan their schedules and get productive in-person time, while at the same time giving them the flexibility to work from home when the work of a specific day doesn’t require them to be in the office. It amazed me that the team took this feature — which is very complex under the hood — from concept to reality in a very short time and delivered a feature that completely blew away my expectations. I use workweek every day to plan my own schedule, and it’s better than anything else out there on the market.
This type of creativity, teamwork and commitment to solving problems that many of us experience every day is what sets Robin apart and has really powered our growth.
