We Just Raised $15 Million: Here’s What That Means For You

In 1998, I got my my first job as a bag boy at a grocery store in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. As an hourly employee, I loved having the opportunity to collect my first pay paycheck, but absolutely hated everything about employee scheduling.

For me, there was nothing more annoying than having to make a trip to the grocery store on my day off to find out when I worked next. It was the most frustrating feeling ever as an employee. Sometimes I’d go in and find that the schedule wasn’t quite ready yet, and other times, I’d see it posted but learn that I’d been accidentally scheduled to work on a day that I had requested off. It was a pain. At the same time, I knew my manager wasn’t to blame. The technology and tools we have today just didn’t exist back then, and so scheduling was often just as frustrating for my manager, who had to deal with an overwhelming flurry of time off requests, missed shifts, and habitually late employees.

I often found myself thinking about what could be done to solve these problems and make the whole scheduling experience better and more efficient for business owners and their employees.

Fast forward ten years later to 2008, and you’d find, as I did, that despite major innovations in business processes and technology, the same problem that existed ten years prior still existed.

No one had done anything to fix employee scheduling.

So I decided to do something about it.

In 2010, with the help of a small team, I launched a SaaS startup called When I Work in an effort to fix employee scheduling and attendance for small business owners and the hourly employees who worked for them.

In the six years since launching, we’ve made some significant progress:

• Over 50,000 businesses in 50 countries now rely on When I Work for scheduling, communicating, and tracking time with their teams.
• Over 2 million hourly employees have used our product to check the schedule where they work.
• Over half a billion hours have been worked.
• Over 5 million shifts have been traded.

I’m proud of the dent we’ve been able to make as a company and the impact we’ve made on businesses around the world.

But here’s the truth—we’ve only really started to scratch the surface.

There’s so much more work to be done to help business owners and the 2 billion people working hourly jobs today, and we’re just getting started. As a company, we have an unprecedented opportunity to double down on the progress we’ve made and the success we’ve experienced to help more businesses everywhere run better.

Here’s more information on what this announcement means for you:

For current customers and users: Our customers and users have always been the inspiration for what we build and create. It’s your validation that keeps us motivated and looking forward to whatever comes next. We plan to invest heavily in our customer experience and products (we’re doubling the size of our existing team from 100 to 200 employees, with an emphasis on scaling product and development). What we’ve found is that if we enable managers and employees to work better together through communication and collaboration on core business operations like scheduling and attendance, then we have an unprecedented opportunity to make businesses more efficient and more successful in what they do. To us, workforce management isn’t first about compliance and control. It’s first about communication and collaboration — everything else comes after that. This new round of funding will help us bring a deeper communication and collaboration experience to our core products and allow us to augment them with new functionality that solves more problems while keeping things simple.

For businesses not yet using When I Work: It’s never been a better time to start using When I Work. Over the next 12 months, we’re going to be hiring more talent, making big improvements to our products, and introducing new tools to help make collaborating and communicating with your team easier than ever before. If you’re ready to fix scheduling and attendance at your business, create your free account today.

For anyone looking to join the When I Work team as an employee: This new round of funding will allow us to aggressively acquire more talent and build up our engineering, product, sales, and marketing teams. We need your help. We’re looking to double the size of our existing team, from 100 to 200 employees. We’re also moving our headquarters to a new location that will allow us to grow, which will be announced later this month. Sound interesting? Check out our open positions and apply now.

I couldn’t be more excited to continue on our mission to make work less work for business owners and hourly employees everywhere. Whether you’re a current user, future customer, or interested candidate, I look forward to continuing on this journey with you!