A new app to connect key workers during COVID-19 has launched with £8.2m funding.
Smart employee Blink has been developed and deployed in partnership with leading organisations including Stagecoach, Domino’s and the NHS to empower and protect frontline and key workers inside their organisations.
The company, founded by CEO Sean Nolan, designed the app to empower key workers on the frontline. It provides them with a single app to access all important information and systems and the ability to connect with their colleagues.
Blink has already raised £8.2million in capital, led by Paris and San Francisco based venture capital firm Partech, alongside a roster of high profile Angel Investors.
For the past year, Blink has been partnering with frontline organisations to solve real-life problems for their workers. The first major rollout in January 2019 was for 22,000 employees at transport company Stagecoach. Employees can access rosters, complete digital forms for leave, absence and accidents, access digital payslips and feedback in real-time to managers on issues and concerns impacting them.
Since then, Blink has been deployed in over 100 organisations in 14 countries including customers such as the NHS and the Prison Service. Two months into the lockdown, Blink had been accessed 25 million times by frontline workers.
The Blink app allows companies to push out information to employees’ personal phones, like wellbeing & compliance messages, including Covid-19 updates. Crucially, it supports employees who were previously disconnected from the workplace; it gives them a voice to feedback to managers; it protects them through reducing transference risks from paper by introducing digital forms.
Blink delivers tangible results for its customers: doubling employee engagement rates and dropping staff turnover by up to 26 per cent. In recognition of their new approach to transforming frontline culture, Blink won three ‘Digital Workplace of the Year’ awards last year in the USA, UK and Australia, against competition from Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
So far in 2020, the Blink team has doubled in size and opened offices in Sydney and New York. Demand for their service has required a further recruitment drive, with plans to double in size again this summer. April saw the company growing at the fastest pace yet, as companies adopted Blink as part of their Covid-19 response, with the highest growth in the Healthcare and Care Home sectors.
Blink is now opening up the platform so any company can get started immediately with a simple online set-up process via the company website. With a 14 day free trial, 24/7 support, and a 100 day money-back guarantee, companies can connect their entire workforces today.
Sean Nolan, CEO of Blink, commented: “The Covid-19 crisis has underlined the critical role that frontline and key workers play in our society. The whole deskless workforce has been starved of investment. Now more than ever they need empowering with better tools so they can effectively perform their essential roles.
“Every worker needs instant access to the latest information around staying safe, a voice for feeding back to management, and the capability to support their peers on the frontline.”
“We started Blink to make it easy to empower workers wherever they are; with information at their fingertips but also have a voice in improving day-to-day operations. We believe if you empower and equip those on the frontline, they are best positioned to make a difference. The organisations that will survive and thrive in the next decade will be those who put their frontline first.”