Companies spend lots of time trying to figure out who is engaged with their work, which managers are the most effective leaders, and how to keep good employees from leaving. Historically, those insights have been the product of hunches and theories. Now, a St. Louis-based startup is offering digestible data and analytics to organizations that will help them make informed decisions about their most important and expensive assets—their people.
OrgAcuity, founded by Craig Starbuck and Matt Milunski, is an employee listening platform that specializes in people analytics to make traditional human resources functions more data-driven and helpful. The company, which is part of the latest cohort of Arch Grants recipients, built its model to absorb information about how employees are being treated and how they feel about their jobs to predict how those feelings affect an organization’s trajectory—and ultimately impact the bottom line.
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“A company’s most important resource is human capital,” Starbuck says.
People analytics is the practice of using data to identify actionable insights, barriers to success, and opportunities for improvement that will create long-term effectiveness. OrgAcuity’s platform relies on three data sources: employee surveys, HR data (this includes demographics, firmographics, etc.), and certain company data that allows OrgAcuity to correlate employee experiences with business outcomes. The platform is available to organizations—that includes for-profit companies, nonprofits, and government entities—of at least 250 people.
“When you’re presenting to the likes of a CFO of a large company, they want to know things like If we’re going to invest in employee experience and employee engagement initiatives, can you quantify for me the extent to which it actually influences business outcomes,” Starbuck says. “Those are things like financial performance, productivity, customer satisfaction, customer churn rates—things that really drive the business.”
Starbuck says his company can answer those questions, “and quantify the extent to which these different improvements in employee experiences, attitudes, motivation, and engagement actually drive the business forward.”
Why it matters: The cost of replacing a great employee can be expensive. Platforms such as OrgAcuity’s can help companies protect their investments in their employees. “There are loads of hidden, insidious barriers to success that are prohibiting people from thriving in an organization and leveraging their potential to their full capabilities,” Starbuck says. “To identify what those barriers are, you need data, you need analytics, and you need intelligence. Without software like OrgAcuity, managers are flying blind.”
What’s next: The past four years have been dedicated to building and perfecting the SaaS product, understanding the offerings of competitors, and gameplannning around gaps in the market. After recently receiving an award from Arch Grants, Starbuck says OrgAcuity is taking a different path in 2025.
“We’re really doubling down that 2025 will be a year for marketing and sales,” Starbuck says. “We’ve been focused on building a scalable platform to accommodate thousands and thousands of employers of any size. But I feel like we’re in a good place now. So what’s next? 2025 will be a year of growth.”
