BetterWorks Adds Groups And Permissions To Its Office Perks Platform

Anthony Ha

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and random startups. Previously, he worked as a staff tech writer at Adweek, a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... → Learn More

Monday, April 23rd, 2012
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BetterWorks, a startup that helps companies give their employees perks and rewards, is launching new features that should make it a better fit for big enterprises.

The startup offers customers a dashboard for managing things like office catering, discounts at local businesses, and a rewards program called Bonus Bucks. For the most part, it has focused on small- and medium-sized businesses (between five and 500 employees) — after all, those are the companies that normally don’t have the resources to offer these programs on their own. However, Director of Product Varun Krishna says that larger organizations, with 1,000 or more employees, are starting to show interest too.

Naturally, big companies have their own needs, prompting the BetterWorks’ new features. For the first time, the system allows employers to divide the workforce into different groups, so that they can have their own conversations. Companies can determine how they want to set up the groups, whether it’s by department, floor, or building, but Krishna says the biggest use case will probably involve grouping by different locations — after all, a lot of the discussion in your Los Angeles office probably isn’t relevant to the folks in San Francisco. For now, people can only belong to one group; eventually, Krishna says you should be able to join multiple, so you could belong a group for your department and another for people who go to yoga after work.

And to support the more complex hierarchy at larger organizations, BetterWorks has also created different permission levels. You can identify different managers as Company Leads and Group Leads, and then specify what each of those roles entails.

Krishna and Head of Communications Nicole Jordan argue that these features are the next step in achieving one of BetterWorks’ big goals, which is to make the incentive system targeted for each employee, so that you’re not just giving everyone the same rewards.

BetterWorks is now used by more than 500 companies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Austin.

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Company: BetterWorks
Website: betterworks.com
Launch Date: October 31, 2010
Funding: $10.5M

BetterWorks’ company mission is to help small and medium-sized businesses recognize, reward and retain employees by “Making Work Rewarding.” The BetterWorks local perks and reward platform helps small and medium-sized business take care of employees with big-company style employee perks and recognition. The online platform makes it easy for employers to provide personalized perks that drive productivity and engagement. The company is venture-backed by Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, SoftTech VC, 500 Startups and others. The service is currently available...

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