Interview: Charlotte Melkert, founder of Equalture

“My name is Charlotte and I’m one of the founders of Equalture, a Team Composition Technology that helps scaling companies develop the right team composition to grow their business - meaning that the people in a team together master the right mix of skills, competencies and personalities. We started this company because we firmly believe that your team is your most important growth engine. And we’re a scaling company ourselves as well! We started Equalture 2,5 years ago and are now with a team of 13 people. After raising €1M funding last February we are planning to grow rapidly the coming years.”

“Normally Equalture’s software is used to analyse and optimise your current team and of course also to translate your team analytics into your hiring strategy. These analyses are conducted by letting people complete a set of neuro-assessment games. 

Due to the corona outbreak, however, many companies started freezing their hiring activities to be able to fully focus on their current team and how to make sure that everyone works efficiently in these challenging times. One of the risks for efficient working now is that we all need to work remotely. Of course, this new setting doesn't have to be challenging, as long as you are aware of the skills required to work from home effectively. That’s why we decided to Launch Remotely, a tool that uses Equalture’s neuro-assessment games to analyse and improve people's remote working skills to prevent productivity loss in this all-remote environment. It takes employees 15 minutes to complete and a Remotely Report is generated automatically, providing both employees and managers with useful insights and practical recommendations to train remote working skills. 

“The coronavirus impacts everyone tremendously, including startups. It’s how you respond to these kinds of situations that shows your entrepreneurial skills. For 99% of the startups, there’s a pivot opportunity. So being able to pivot is not so much of a challenge. It’s about whether you find your own pivot opportunity and how quickly you can adapt to your company. What I would need to increase our impact on this crisis is having like-minded entrepreneurs around me who also keep trying to find opportunities that keep their business rolling. And that’s what everyone needs! As long as we can collectively pivot ourselves and find a way to keep running by using each other's pivots, we can keep the economy running together as well. I highly believe that this ‘collective pivot movement’ can help us get even stronger out of this situation, as long as we keep going instead of pausing everything.