Enterprise companies have sophisticated systems to identify and track their best employees. Small businesses often lack the resources to assign people to the task. With a new software tool called JuvodHR, serial entrepreneurs Susan Mravca and Peter Spevacek offer an alternative.
“We needed a better way to do performance reviews,” Mravca said. She and Spevacek previously founded a company, online foreign language tutor InterLangua, and both are members of the Hyde Park Angels investment organization.
Inspired by her struggles to compare and rank workers in previous small businesses, Mravca wanted a program to serve companies that employed fewer than 100 employees. She and Spevacek spent a year and a half developing JuvodHR. This involved mining O*NET, a clunky Department of Labor database that lists occupations and the work styles and traits associated with them.
In early February, JuvodHR went live on the Intuit app store, which features partners whose solutions cover territory that Intuit’s accounting software doesn’t. Such apps can integrate with QuickBooks, although those that use other accounting programs can use JuvodHR independently. After a 14-day trial, the software costs $3 per month per employee.
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The cloud-based system culls 13,000 job descriptions, each supplemented by more than 250 data points, to deliver “valid and meaningful” information, Mravca said. JuvodHR uses this data to create thousands of searchable job descriptions, which managers can link to performance reviews.
JuvodHR comes at the right time — as an increase in the federal minimum wage becomes a topic of discussion in Congress and the White House, said Ronny Tey, group marketing manager for the Intuit Partner Platform and Intuit App Center.
“It’s important for small businesses to see who are their top performers and put together a plan to retain them,” Tey said. That requires an objective way to measure employees.
Academics write the job descriptions used in JuvodHR, which means they are more complete and objective than the blurbs employers find when searching for job summaries online, Mravca says. JuvodHR is the first system for small businesses that uses scientific and academic sources to create the criteria on which employees are evaluated.
Much of the system is customizable. Managers can edit or delete specific tasks associated with job descriptions. When doing reviews, the system suggests feedback language to give employees based on their performance. Managers can remove any comments before the feedback gets converted into a printed report for the employee to keep.
Spevacek, who leads JuvodHR’s engineering team, said he thinks he has developed some user experience innovations. One is a feature he calls “search to edit,” in which search results feature forms that managers can modify immediately, without having to click “edit” or perform any other actions. The other is a rating tool nicknamed a “menos form” (for the Spanish word that means “less” ). This involves dragging a ball across a matrix of work traits, allowing the reviewer to visualize where an employee falls on the spectrum of precision versus dependability, for example.
“You don’t need a master’s degree to operate the system,” Spevacek said. With a diverse array of early clients, including a 14-person machine shop, he focused on intuitive design to produce a simple app that required no additional training.
Consider the Weil Foot and Ankle Institute, a network of 14 clinics across Illinois and Indiana. The organization was using a pen and paper system in late November when Mravca and Spevacek invited it to beta test the system with its 50 reviewed employees.
“It’s a much better objective analysis system based on proven methodologies,” said Lowell Weil, Jr., the institute’s president and fellowship director, who said he likes the ability to compare employees across departments in a standardized way. “You [can] really put some objective analysis on raises and how much you need to pay people.”