What Parklet gets right that so many other companies get wrong when it comes to building workforce management tools – productivity tools, collaboration tools, project management tools – is that the people involved matter more than the performance of the tool itself.
No matter how feature-rich the product, brilliant the user interface, or seamless the integration with existing business practices, if software doesn’t foster better relationships it defeats its own purpose. No one wants to be a cog in a machine, chewed up by the gears like Chaplin in Modern Times.
As Co-founder Dane Hurtubise mentioned in his winning DEMO pitch for enterprise, the younger workforce wants to connect with employers and for their personal values to align with a company’s mission.
Parklet helps build such connections through a directory that highlights the personal details of personnel. Profiles cover work skills and experience as well as values and outside interests. An introduction to a manager and timeline of a business’s history welcome a new employee and encourage engagement with coworkers. From the orientation process to the last day on the job, while participating on any number of different teams within the organization along the way, Parklet is about finding the right people fit.
According to the website:
“At Parklet, we believe that a company’s most valuable and scarce resource is its people. Organizations that drive decision making by optimizing the value of their people will be successful. We are empowering people centric decision making by writing software that understands your organization and helps you focus on what matters most.”
There’s certainly nothing new about task tracking, directories, workflows, or attempts to harness insights into internal growth and process. Pulse, Parklet’s version of displaying content and insights in the moment, company-wide, is hardly the first of its kind. However, the team growing potential of this software has earned the company a notable following.
Fast growing companies such as Path, Twitch, TaskRabbit, and Disqus are among early customers. Angel investors and advisors include Andrew McCollum (Co-founder of Facebook), Darian Shirazi (CEO of Radius), Hiten Shah (Co-founder of KISSMetrics), and Rob Dennis (Founder of People.co).
Scaling requires people power, which means retaining top talent and finding new hires that mesh with company vision. Built with the internal tools of Google and Twitter in mind, listen for Parklet becoming a familiar name in conversations about the changing approach to people operations.
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Parklet