What I Built: Ifat Ribon’s COVID-friendly scheduling and communications app

What I Built: Ifat Ribon’s COVID-friendly scheduling and communications app

In 2017, Ifat Ribon created a scheduling app for Olympus, a janitorial service company for colleges and universities. The app, meant as a replacement for paper schedules, sent electronic records to employees so they would know where they were going and what tasks they would do. Originally intended to prevent lost schedules and out-of-date task lists, in 2020 the app also served to prevent potential COVID infections.

As a convenient, robust, and familiar resource for the staff, Olympus became an essential backbone for COVID communications. The app was able to push out mass text messages, including information about new safety protocols, or whether or not it was safe to go to work. It also included a messaging feature that allowed managers at Olympus to keep tabs on how employees were feeling during the pandemic.

Meet the creator: Ifat Ribon

Ifat Ribon is a senior software developer at Launchpad, a Chicago-based company that develops apps for other businesses. Her journey into tech has been successful but unexpected. In college, she studied business and Spanish, but also discovered the joys of Visual Basic. After consulting for Ernst & Young, she decided to mesh her abilities in problem solving with her interests in tech and code. Ribon signed up for an online boot camp. When she finished, she joined Launchpad’s apprentice program, which allows people who’ve changed careers to start off as developers.

As a self-made software developer, Ribon chases her dreams and her software solutions with the same agile fervor. “Almost everyone at Launchpad is a career switcher,” she said. “It’s important to just keep trying stuff. One of the first things someone told me when I was a junior developer was just get it to work. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to be fast, just do whatever you can to get it to work.”

Her previous experience in consulting also brings her a unique perspective on the importance of communications. “Sometimes clients don’t know what they need and it’s kind of like solving a puzzle, you have to ask the right questions to help them unlock the information to build the product they need. As developers, we’re constantly engaging with clients.”

Increasing Employee Engagement

Olympus does more than just send info to the employees about their schedules and policies. It also takes conversational feedback from the employees about their work environment and shifts, and it thanks them for their work.

Olympus was looking to increase employee engagement, particularly since managers did not necessarily have insight into the experiences of their janitors and the conditions of sites and jobs. To create better communication cadences,  Ribon added a feature for conversational feedback. After a shift, employees get a text asking them how the shift went and if they ran into any issues. The app would then parse the content of their message at a high level, recording the contents of the message in an activity log for managers. Then, it would send a reply to employees thanking them for their hard work.

How the Olympus app was built

The Olympus app is built on Ruby on Rails and React, with a separate API client structure hosted on Heroku. Ribon used Twilio SMS for the texting feature that sends employees a link with their schedule and tasks for the day. Over the past four years, Olympus also requested that the app contain a light CRM feature so the various universities knew who their key contacts were for cleaning, as well as building sizes and number of rooms in a building.

What’s next?

Ribon is looking to add more features to the Olympus app, such as reminders to complete certain tasks. In addition, she also wants to build in the ability to take into account user preferences—some users might want their schedule the night before instead of an hour before a shift, others might not want a daily reminder of what their tasks are.

On a more personal level, Ribon is inspired by simplicity in apps and clean thinking. “It’s incredibly fun to have a problem set and to write something to solve it and see something happen right away. There’s such an immediate feedback loop—I find it exhilarating,” Ribon says.

As Ribon progresses in her career, she wants to apply this kind of thinking at a higher level for tech architectural decisions such as choosing the best tools for a project, understanding takeaways after projects, and identifying new opportunities. She’s also excited to see an increasing amount of diversity in the tech world.

“It’s been wonderful to see all these communities popping up around less represented groups in tech,” she says. “It’s empowering to see other women in higher positions—and it’s fun for me to be a leader at Launchpad. The next transition is realizing I could be an inspiration to someone else.”

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