Company culture is made of several ingredients. Some of them may be considered small things compared to best practices such as “cultivating transparency” and “giving constructive criticism.” However, minute improvements that have an immediate, positive impact on employees’ lives can go a long way in contributing to company culture.
Let’s see the case of Motus. This Boston-based company provides a system meant to simplify the life of field-based mobile employees who need to drive their own car for work. The Motus app, which users can download on their phones, captures mileage and automatically calculates reimbursements.
“Many companies treat all of their employees the same from a reimbursement perspective or from a vehicle perspective,” Motus CEO Craig Powell said in an interview. “[But] Gas in Wichita has a different price than it is in Southern California.”
The Motus app takes into account several factors. First, users need to download it on their phone. Most users, according to Powell, configure it to start according to their regular business hours. The app, which works thanks to the accelerometer inside the phone, will take a look at the gas prices down the road users are driving, as well as car insurance data. Then, depending how the company handles reimbursements, the app will push the data directly in the employee’s expense report or to Motus, which will issue an ACH for the refund.
“Our end users tend to be folks that wake up and drive in non-specialty vehicles, so a lot of folks in the healthcare space, traveling nurses, folks in pharma and biotech, folks in the food and beverage industry,” Powell listed.
Since such use of the phone takes a toll on the battery, the company is doing several things to avoid draining a phone’s charge. One example is the Motus Beacon, a small hardware device that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to sense when a user’s mobile device is near their vehicle, and turn mileage tracking on when the vehicle begins moving, or off when the user is away.
Founded in 2004, Motus currently has almost 350 clients and 100 employees, according to Powell. Millennials make up 76% of Motus’ workforce, and the age range of Motus’ Millennial workers are 21 – 35.
“We don’t think [company] culture is a dress code, we don’t think it’s a foosball table,” Powell concluded. “It is the essence of our value set and the essence the way we run the organization.”
Featured image credits: Photo courtesy of Motus.
