Rahkeem Morris (MBA 2018) spent the first 10 years of his work life as an hourly wage earner, moving from one minimum wage job to the next, often unable to transfer learned skills or training to his new roles. The cycle wasn’t good for businesses or for hourly workers, Morris realized: Companies lost money on training, and employees often started right back at minimum wage with each new job as they worked to learn an entirely new set of skills.

This insight is at the heart of Syrg, which Morris founded in 2018 to bring together employers and their former employees so that both can benefit. The company uses a web-based application to connect employers and former workers in good standing, and allows employers to automate and manage their interactions with former employees. Syrg’s model—pooling and then nurturing former talent for future permanent and temporary “on-demand” positions—has helped businesses save more than $1,000 per permanent hire by bypassing recruitment, background checks, and training. It has also helped hourly employees pick up extra work.

“You can imagine that if you’re a store manager, you want somebody who’s familiar with your systems and your culture,” notes Morris. “And we’re trying to get people who have had that training, to be able to use it to earn additional income.” Syrg also specializes in improving retention rates, surveying employees who leave a company and using that data to help businesses address issues that contribute to turnover. The company has also recently started applying relationship management to former applicants and current employees.

Morris has long understood the ways shift changes, small, incremental wage increases, and lack of flexibility can affect workers and their families. When Morris was in high school, his mother was given an ultimatum: Switch your nursing shift from afternoons to mornings or find a new job. “She wanted to keep her job,” says Morris. “So I ended up taking my little brother to school every single day, and that led to my missing first period all the time. And then that dominoed into missing entire days of school. Then I just dropped out.”

From there, Morris held 13 hourly jobs over the course of 10 years—from fast-food worker to waiter to dialysis technician—to help make ends meet for his family and to put himself through a program that would allow him to earn his high school degree through night courses.

After one particularly frustrating temp gig—working as a forklift operator with no training—he remembered a restaurant in Albany, New York, that rehired him every summer and winter break during his undergrad years at Cornell. The two experiences got him thinking: Why don’t more companies take advantage of their former workers?

“When hourly workers leave their jobs, they leave behind everything, including the training and skills they’ve acquired in the role,” says Morris. “That training and those skills don’t always lead to additional income over time.” Building a company that would allow businesses to retain that training investment, and allow workers to build more wealth, seemed like a problem worth solving.

The coronavirus pandemic has made the company’s model more relevant than ever. “When we get people on the phone and pitch what we’re doing, it makes sense to them,” observes Morris. Not only with companies, he says, but also with former employees who may have lost jobs or been placed on furlough and, through Syrg, are able now to make use of their skills from former positions.

Syrg is working now to prepare employers for a mass exodus of employees in a post-pandemic world. The company predicts that 50 percent of organizations’ newly hired workers in 2020 will return to former positions when furloughs end. Syrg’s platform will help employers build a flexible workforce they can call on when—and if—new hires head back to a former position. They’ve also launched UIHelp.org, to help people navigate unemployment insurance through the pandemic. Since April, the site has helped more than 140,000 workers find benefits and jobs.

Today, Syrg has 25 employers on its platform, among them some of the largest employers in the world, as it works to create a massive workforce and increase efficiency. But it’s the shift workers—workers like he and his mother once were—who are at the heart of Morris’s young company. “Work is an experience in which virtually everyone partakes to support themselves and their families, yet ‘work’ is so fundamentally broken for millions, especially for hourly workers,” explains Morris, who is a trustee at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology and notes that, for many students, hourly jobs and site work are the primary reasons they don’t finish their degrees. “Syrg is all about giving back to the people who gave me a chance, making possibility scalable while breaking the cycle that leads to poor outcomes for everyone involved.”

Note: This article was updated in February 2022 to update the name of Rahkeem’s company.

Post a Comment