Workplace performance tool Teamly leaves beta, launches free and paid plans

In an announcement today from Teamly, a workplace performance enhancement tool, the company said that it has left beta testing behind and is launching both free and paid plans. Furthermore, the service said it has reached the milestone of the 100,000th “priority” being created by one of its users.

“After 9 months of beta trials with individuals and companies, large and small, I am delighted to announce our commercial launch,” said Scott Allison, founder & CEO of Teamly. “Businesses all around the world are enjoying the benefits of using Teamly to improve the productivity and effectiveness of their employees in a lightweight manner. We allow individuals to adopt Teamly for free, and later businesses can subscribe for our Professional plan once they have seen the value for themselves.”

Teamly is used by over 6000 individuals in hundreds of companies world-wide. Since its beta launch in July 2010, more than 100,000 goals or objectives, known in the Teamly world as “priorities”, have been created by users of the software-as-a-service. The new plans offered by Teamly include an $8 for each user per month that is fully-featured, including phone and email support, enhanced security measures and the ability to share statistics and reports as well as export data. The free plans allow for Teamly to be used without some of the aforementioned features (support is offered through email but not over the phone), but also has no limitations for priority and task management, email reminders and sharing among colleagues.

Allison went on to explain both the appeal and the benefits of Teamly’s new user interface (as shown above). “The pie chart indicates the last 30 days of your priority completion stats – this helps motivate users to finish what they set out to do and also to remind users to keep their dashboard up to date,” says Allison. “The key thing about our slick new UI is that everything you need is now accessible from the main dashboard, so you can access your colleagues and review your performance from one screen.”

Teamly is already being used by companies such as Media Temple. The web-hosting company based in Los Angeles, California is one of Teamly’s largest accounts.

“The (mt) leadership team needed a low friction way to keep our daily, weekly and monthly goals in sync that didn’t conflict with our personal GTD systems,” explains Demian Sellfors, Media Temple Inc.’s CEO. “Teamly has been successful where other systems have failed due to its simple, ‘Top 5’ approach and lightweight interface.”

Teamly conducted research efforts that illustrated that only one quarter of businesses are using any kind of ‘performance management’ software. A serial entrepreneur himself, Allison explains why his experiences of starting and growing businesses revealed the need for a tool like Teamly.

“It can be overwhelming as a manager to evaluate your employees’ objectives and performance objectively without it taking up lots of time and effort,” Allison suggests.

Teamly’s not about to slow down on the heels of today’s announcement. The company’s vision is “to be the leading software solution for managing teams in the workplace”. Long-term plans include development of mobile apps and integrating with other popular platforms and products such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

You sign up for any of Teamly’s plans at their website.