Culture Club

In human resources, software can handle many tasks. Now, it may take on its most vexing issue yet: building company culture.

That’s the vision of Nate DaPore, president and CEO of PeopleMatter, which provides hire-to-retire software-as-a-service (SaaS) for restaurants, hospitality and retail.

“We wanted to really change the way the employer and the employee interact in the workplace,” DaPore says. “We use culture as a catalyst to build a company’s brand. The system focuses on identifying those traits, developing them, engaging them and helping build the company’s brand, which leads to higher profits, sales and viral marketing of that brand.”

Defining that culture is still up to the employer: PeopleMatter merely provides the “process and structure, and a vehicle to enforce and build that culture,” DaPore says. “It allows the CEO to have a distribution channel to communicate with employees and also to provide structure and metrics around that brand-building and culture.”

Longer-range plans include coordinating schedules through the software, giving customers the ability to see the social media profiles of on-duty staffers when they enter a store. When customers “check-in” via a geolocation program such as FourSquare, they can also rate the service received by individual employees. Employers can create rewards based on service ratings.

“It’s unique to the employer who sets the game and the rewards,” DaPore says. “From the customer standpoint ...[it] looks like a rating system of one to five based on the service that you receive. The employer interprets that rating and sets the rewards and badges in their work environment.” He calls the system “extremely innovative and extremely powerful for furthering the mission and the brand.”

It’s also just in the testing phase. For now, PeopleMatter focuses on the hiring process. The applicant tracking system “really allows the operators to quickly find good talent that’s going to be able to further the brand and build the organization,” DaPore says.

Early adopters
Parker’s Convenience Stores, a 20-store chain in coastal Georgia and South Carolina, joined PeopleMatter in late 2010 and found it to be a “user-friendly” system, says Beth Harn, Parker’s human resources manager.

“The system that we used before was not very user-friendly,” Harn says. “We’d get repeated telephone calls from [applicants] saying, ‘I exited out of the program and now it won’t let me back in,’ or ‘It won’t let me update.’ It wasn’t very user-friendly from the standpoint of our in-store trainers and managers … either.”

Harn says PeopleMatter provides an assessment tool that “allows us to know more about the applicant before we schedule the interview.”

She has high hopes for the onboarding segment of the first module. “Paperwork can be quite time-consuming for our trainers,” she says, and “PeopleMatter has set it up so that the majority of the paperwork can be completed on the applicant’s home PC after he is hired. By the time the new hire comes in, we may only have to make a few adjustments and he’s ready to go.”

“Our trainers and managers say it takes less time,” Harn says. “They like the fact that it’s on the Internet and can be accessed from home because of the number of interruptions they face when in the stores.”

Next phases
The second and third modules, devoted to scheduling and learning, are due out in 2011. Using mobile devices, employees will be able to “trade shifts, pick up new shifts, release shifts,” DaPore says. “It creates good operational efficiencies … and it’s got the employee in the system every day and loving it.”

After those pieces are in place, PeopleMatter will move into performance and rewards, linking the social media facets into its SaaS offering. Already, the company is in discussions with two large social media companies — “two of the biggest brands,” DaPore says.

The social media application — in which a user can rate employees — will have multiple benefits, DaPore believes. “Geolocation social media is exploding. What we’re doing is capitalizing on that movement from a talent management perspective.”

“If you just did feedback from Yelp or Foursquare, you would just rate the total experience,” he says. Because we have the individual on our platform and are integrated with the POS system … you can rate the individual.”

Keeping PeopleMatter a SaaS offering allows for continued improvements and quick deployment. “That’s the flexibility of the SaaS delivery model: A two-unit operator can take advantage of the same features that the 2,000-unit operator does,” DaPore says. “It’s a community, and the community is really driving the product.”

It’s a two-way street, says Amy Lane, COO for Parker’s Convenience Stores. “They’re just great to work with — very respectful of all of our ideas. I think it's going to be a great tool for the industry once all the pieces get added to it."