Josh creates a chat room in his spare time – An Einstein indeed

At The Rackspace Cloud, we certainly have hard-working dedicated individuals but most importantly, we have creators.  Employee engagement and recognition is a core element to the Rackspace culture. As Chairman Graham Weston mentioned in a Business Week article earlier this week, “Employee engagement is not about crazy perks. Our work is more about how can we make you be at your best.”

We award the Albert Einstein Award to those who go beyond the standard expectation to innovate new functionality or major improvements. We’ve had winners from software development, engineering and now support. Their contributions all had a significant impact on our cloud computing business and customer experience.

Today we presented The Rackspace Cloud ‘Einstein Award for Innovation’ to a member of the Slicehost Support team for the work he put into creating and maintaining their public chatroom (http://chat.slicehost.com).  The Slicehost team heavily relies on their chatroom to effectively communicate with their customers, solving their technical issues.

As their team grew, the chatroom they were using wasn’t really working and they needed a new solution. Josh Kearney, 3rd shift support lead, volunteered to look into how they can better communicate with their customers.  He may not have realized the size of the job when he volunteered but he tackled this project head on doing much of the development in his spare time.

His manager, Paul Tomes, comments:

We can’t give Josh enough praise for his effort and determination to see the project through the end and he still continues to improve it.

We also like facts and figures so I reckon we can share this with you:

•    Took Josh something like 80+ hours dedicated to designing and creating the room.
•    Allows customers to chat live, from any web browser at any time of the day or night.
•    Allows us to ban those silly people who want to cause havoc and link to nasty websites.
•    Customers can paste text & images into the room, which assists when explaining an issue.

Congrats Josh! An Einstein indeed!