The role RandomCoffee plays in supporting Freshworks Women’s 360 groups to leverage their careers

Freshworks creates cloud-based software solutions for businesses. Founded in Chennai, India, in 2010 as Freshdesk, the company has a product suite ranging from sales CRM software to recruitment tools and customer-support helpdesk software.The company has grown quickly to 1,000+ employees globally, across five offices, and its software is already being used by over 130,000 organizations around the world.

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In what context did you set up RandomCoffee at Freshworks?

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Our Freshworks Women's 360 Group is a group dedicated to empowering the women of North America Freshworks to come together and empower each other in the workplace. Being that the technology industry is a male-dominated space, it provides a support system to leverage each other in our careers.

We set up Random Coffee to randomly connect women with one another who may otherwise not have met, especially at a time when the pandemic has forced a lot of people into working remotely.

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What has changed since the setting up of these meetings?

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The women of Freshworks have been able to connect with a variety of women in Freshworks across North America and different industries. It has provided an opportunity to network with others outside of those they work with on a day-to-day basis.

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Can you tell us what it has brought you in concrete terms?

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For me, it has brought me to learn about different careers and life lessons in my industry. It has also brought me the opportunity to provide perspective from my department to other departments.
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For example, being in sales, I got to share my thoughts and ideas with a manager in customer success. Even though we don't always work together, we both touch the customer and it was good to learn from each other.

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If a company expressed the same needs as yours before you started the Random Coffee experience, what would you say to them?

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I would say to make sure to consider the group you are looking to bring RandomCoffee to in order to plan for how often to connect with colleagues and what questions to prompt with, ect. I would also recommend sending out occasional surveys on the effectiveness of how you leverage RandomCoffee and to get ideas.

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What were the key success factors and what results did you observe?

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Key success factor: satisfaction usage like how often women were making the effort to schedule a time to meet each other.

Result 1: 80% of women in North America want to keep leveraging the software to connect with other women

Result 2: 80% of women like the consistency of being paired about once every month