Team Vitality is a French esports organization created in 2013 by Fabien Devide and Nicolas Maurer. In ten years, the organization has become a leader in France and Europe and is evolving internationally, competing in the most competitive esports leagues in the world.
Composed of international players with exceptional talent, the organization is fully dedicated to the identification and development of esports athletes.
Team Vitality has an international presence with 3 offices across the world in Paris, Berlin and Mumbai where it trains its athletes and connects with fans.
Since its launch in 2013, Team Vitality has raised a total of 86M€ in four rounds. Its last round of 50M€ in January 2022 enabled them to expand their activities both in Europe and beyond, to become one of the most successful esports organizations.
In total, the Team Vitality community has over 12 million fans across all social networks, with global partners such as Tezos and Hummel.
Since 2021, Team Vitality has used Café to manage its hybrid organization across four offices located in three different countries.
The release of Café’s public API in December 2022 has provided Café users with numerous new opportunities - with the aim of delivering a simple, customized, intentional approach to hybrid work that consistently enhances the employee experience.
Switching to hybrid work with Café
Team Vitality hybrid model and employee experience
When Team Vitality switched to a hybrid and flex-office strategy 2 years ago, the challenge was twofold:
1) to put a flexible policy in place that favored remote work, while encouraging employees to connect and share their office days with the rest of their teams.
With a flexible remote work policy, employees need visibility over each other’s plans in order to assure social moments throughout their co-located working hours.
As is often the case, the biggest risk with a remote-first policy is that employees may find themselves alone in a ghosted workplace - or without a work bestie to grab lunch with - during the few days they spend in the office per month.
2) Team Vitality has two offices in the Greater area of Paris - one of them being the Headquarters, with dozens of employees working in this region.
Despite these challenges, for two years now, Team Vitality has been providing its employees the flexibility and visibility needed for their hybrid organization. At the same time, they've successfully organized and promoted social moments dedicated for employees to connect intentionally - on a weekly, monthly or even quarterly basis - with the entire organization meeting in Paris four times per year.
Why prioritize visibility with Café?
For the implementation and monitoring of their hybrid policy, Team Vitality has provided Café for employees to centralize place and people information.
In the switch to an organization that favors remote work - with a flex-office policy - their biggest need became enabling employees to choose their days in the office. In order to do that though, they needed to have more visibility over their teammates, colleagues and work besties’ schedules.
"Using Café allows us all to have more visibility on everyone’s presence in the office to meet - and for the HR team to have more accurate fill rates in our spaces."
– Alexandre Evain, IT Manager
Among all the features offered by Café through its web and mobile app, the ability to personalize and synchronize statuses across the rest of their tools remains the most leveraged by the team - thus offering a significant increase in visibility for all employees no matter where they’re logging on from.
The potential for this magnitude of visibility is what convinced Team Vitality to opt for Café when switching to a hybrid model just two years ago, and they’ve never looked back.
"A simple, intuitive, clear and easy-to-present solution"
– Mathis François, IT Specialist
However, in 2 short years, the product has evolved a lot. Now, Café’s Slack integration is Team Vitality’s most used feature, but the recent release of the Café public API has enabled a more personalized and integrated use of the product than ever before.
Using Café's API to build a better experience
Café’s public API offers many options around user data, teams, offices, statuses or even events. Among them, Team Vitality has identified two use cases, allowing them to
- further optimize the use of their spaces and resources, and
- customize certain internal communications for employees
Syncing Café with techstack
Team Vitality uses Café’s API to retrieve the statuses set in Café by each employee. The organization uses Google Workspace amid several other everyday tools, including Google Calendar, to manage its spaces and conference rooms.
In order to optimize the use of its meeting spaces and equipment, the data related to the statuses set in Café are cross-checked with the meetings planned via Google Meet and Calendar.
By using the Café API to find out if employees are in the office or working remotely, the office managers can find out if the scheduled meetings will be in person or remotely.
This process allows them to assess the needs of employees regarding meeting rooms or meeting equipment (projector, television, etc.).
By using the API, it is easy to synchronize and/or export employee location data accurately and in real time.
Create a personalized experience and engage users with Café
As a product that allows companies to customize their hybrid experience and that of their employees, Café’s public API release has multiplied the number of possibilities for organizations to customize the product to fit their individual needs, and significantly expanded its uses.
With Team Vitality, Café serves as the main and single source of truth when it comes to space management and employee scheduling. To ensure that Team Vitality HR team can work properly, the data entered must be accurate and updated as often as possible.
In order to maximize the use of Café and the accuracy of each employee’s calendar, Team Vitality decided to use the API to add additional communications and reminders to employees who have not completed their calendar - on a daily basis.
More specifically, the same data is synchronized - namely the statuses - with their main communication tool, Slack: using Café integration, Team Vitality employees are able to synchronize, set or change their statuses directly from Slack.
Thanks to Café and the different possibilities offered by the public API, Team Vitality is able to not only customize its hybrid experience platform, but also offer a flex-office approach to work that is personalized and delivers the ultimate employee experience.
Look out for more stories of how Café’s public API offers endless possibilities to synchronize people, events, or attendance data and analytics!
Learn more about Team Vitality:
Café, the Social Hub for Hybrid Teams
At Café, we truly believe the future of work is hybrid.
We designed the ultimate social hub for hybrid teams, to enable employees to shape their hybrid work styles with flexibility, transparency, and interest-based connections at the forefront of each social interaction.
We help hybrid and remote first companies increase workplace connectivity and build efficient, flexible, thriving cultures.
Boost office connectivity with social moments and create strong connections across teams from your social hub in Café.
Learn more about companies building people-first cultures
- Veepee: Crafting a successful return to office policy
- Payplug: Building a Hybrid culture in a shared workplace
