Team Happiness metrics SaaS?

Discussions
#1

At my last job we were measuring team happiness metric, it was internally developed, pretty limited in functionality and looked creepy.

Lurking over internet I find out that this method looks like a part of agile methodology (but not that much mentioned).

So, the idea is:

  • weekly each employee receives email (random time during work hours) with link where he/she can estimate his/her team happiness and (maybe?) post some comment (maybe anonymously?);
  • employer can see all statistics (graphs, last week average, month average, etc);
  • (maybe?) employer also should be able to prioritize employees comments, make actionable items from them, archive, etc;

I understand that this is not “aspirin” app and there is no much complexity in solution, also I don’t think price should be high ($5/month, $10/month).

Also, I didn’t find a lot of similar apps, looks like market is not that big.

Do you think somebody will be interested in it? Would you as a employer use it?

I would really appreciate some advices how I can validate market.

Thanks!

#2

I see that more as a project, that can be used to actually get attraction to a main project.
I would never have to count those stuffs and pay for them as metrics.

There are already tools that do it on the scripts used, so better to implement something different for that, as an example is a tool that can be used for free to get the actual users satisfaction

#3

I may be overly cynical, but team (let me use the proper term: resources) happiness is not something that companies optimize for.

#4

Reminds me of Google’s OKR system - objectives and key results.

It scores the key result completion from 0-1 based on the open objectives made by each staff member (I think). Can be done quarterly to give time to achieve those objectives, but tracks performance that way. A bit more business-focused than ‘happiness tracking’, but a similar concept. Removes roadblocks, keeps things moving.

#5

related https://knowyourcompany.com/

2 Likes
#6

I may be overly cynical, but team (let me use the proper term: resources) happiness is not something that companies optimize for.

I guess I was lucky to work for companies where I was not treated only as a resource.

I general - I think if your employees are happy - they will be more loyal to company.
(Some articles also mention better performance)

#7

The skill of a good management is to make resources believe they are treated as humans, while at the same time maintain a set of spreadsheets where each resource’s costs and benefits are meticulously recorded.

More than once I’ve seen (and experienced, too) a feeling of deep disappointment and betrayal when resources was giving up their personal time and best effort to company’s cause, only to learn later that the company lets them go as soon as it made economical sense.

Don’t lie to yourself.

Consequently, do not position it as a happiness gauge; it is “how well we fool them” gauge.

1 Like
#8

There are also things like https://idonethis.com . Once you start looking, there are many apps for team happiness and alike. The key thing is: your customers are mostly HR, but your users are the rest of the company. So, how do you offer something good for your users and convince HR to buy it? (or is it mostly good for HR)

#9

I guess you are right in most cases.

#10

This https://idonethis.com does way more then I planned to implement.

You HRs gonna be good customers, interesting. Thanks.

#11

‘i done this’ is a great but it’s really for letting people claim and mark off tasks in a very simply, lightweight way. It has nothing to do with employee engagement or happiness.

As someone else has pointed out, knowyourcompany.com is in this space. Basically they provide a company wide feedback mechanism to allow people to share their feelings about the company and leadership. When directly engaged to provide feedback, people are much more forthcoming than when their mind is on the day to day grind.

There are also full-blown enterprise vendors for this type of solution. See qualtrics.com/employee-insights. Qualtrics is an enterprise vendor, engagements with them start well north of $10k mark.

Don’t let anyone tell you that companies aren’t interested in understanding how to be better places to work. In sectors where companies compete for talent, retention is an absolute gold mine.

1 Like
#12

I just finished my weekend project, which has quite similar features that you described.

https://tribeops.com

#13

I did not have a chance to confirm my survey, and yet it was sent, and more over - I’ve got a report that the happiness is 10. Then I finally got a chance to click on the selector (the boxes are too small, couldn’t click from the first attempt) and got a new report that the happiness reduced to 7.

I think some checks are not really checking for the manual steps completion.

P.S. And you’ve got lucky I have balls: “Please note that he is able to see your answer.” Otherwise I’d be already suing you for sexism! :smiley:

#14

Hey, thanks for testing it out! I just tried with two different emails and it works. The right emails are being sent at the right time. Did you try it with just one email?

Wow, thanks for pointing it out! Looks like I have a really unfortunate typo, better fix it right away!

#15

Yes, I tried with just one email. I expect that is how most people will try it out before sending anything out to their team.

#16

Oh yeah. One more thing: with the current setup I can send spam to anyone anywhere: “On the scale 1 to 10, what are the chances you’ll buy our Awesome Coffee Maker 3000?”

#17

Hmm, does your email client pre-fetch links? (email client or anti-virus software?) At least Outlook seems to prefetch links, according Stack Overflow.

#18

I was reading it from Outlook, yes. However, it shouldn’t have pre-fetched anything that I did not allow first. I really don’t know, possibly it did.

#19

Yeah, after doing some research, Outlook prefetches links from emails. I has done some for many years. Here is a link for reference, in case somebody experiences these kinds of problems: http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4125/outlook-com-crawls-links-in-my-emails

But, can’t blame Microsoft or Outlook. it’s my bad, since I’ve should have remembered that all resources accessible via GET-requests are open-season in internet. Too bad, fixing this “bug” causes few extra clicks to the users.

Thanks for being my beta tester @rfctr! :slight_smile:

#20

TribeOps looks really great for a weekend project. I like the simple look of the homepage.
Simple styling (did you actually use a CSS lib?)