ARLINGTON, Va. — How many times have you walked into a business trying to get service, but instead, you find a worker on a phone, too busy to help you out? Or maybe you have been the distracted worker? It is a continuous problem in the age of the smartphone.
“You’re here to work you’re not here to play with your phone,” Tenleytown Z-burger owner Peter Tabibian said.
Tabibian has seen the rise of the smartphone firsthand from his restaurants.
“It’s slowing down productivity, ” he reflected.
He said the smartphone invasion of restaurants has affected everything from customer service to food quality; sometimes worse.
“In one of my restaurants the workers are supposed to shut the fryer off before they empty the oil,” Tabibian said. “But they left the fryer on and it started a huge fire because they were distracted by the phone.”
Tabibian said signs and cameras, even stern warnings, don’t seem to make a dent in stopping this cell phone situation.
“I wish somebody would come with something that could be helpful,” he said.
It looks like someone did.
“We were wasting so much money and food loss that could have been prevented if they were a little more engaged in the workplace,” Pryze Co-Founder Natalia Micheletti explained.
Micheletti and her business partner approached the cell phone situation a different way: rewarding workers who stayed off their phones.
“Pryze literally was something I scribbled on a napkin,” she said.
The napkin became the blueprint for the Arlington-based app company Pryze. It is a first-of-its-kind worker reward app.
Here’s how it works: Employees install the app on their phones and accumulate points for not looking at the phone during work.
“In the app, they turn on a little timer when they get to work,” Mitcheletti explained. “From then on they are rewarded with points for every 30 minutes they stay off their phone.”
After workers accumulate enough points, they can redeem them for gift cards.
Pryze has built up a customer base over the last few years. Today, several national and international companies use the app. Micheletti said the feedback has been very positive.
“We are seeing on average 7% to 10% increase in sales,” she said. “And on average over 20% rise in productivity.”
As they continue to grow, Pryze has expanded the role of the app. Employees can now do job training on the app, sign up for extra shifts, and help meet sales goals. After they complete each task-they get points.
“We see Pryze stepping in and building the culture for the whole organization,” Mitcheletti said of the future.
It’s a bold attempt to use a little prize to drive down distracted workers.