In today’s world, there are a variety of factors that can have a negative or positive impact on your employees and their performance. One of them is happiness.
A study by Oxford University found that employees who are happy are 13% more productive and efficient at work, which is clearly a good thing for anyone running a business. To meet this need, start-ups are designing apps to help companies manage employee happiness and indirectly, employee productivity.
The Happy app allows an employee to talk to someone at the press of a button. It provides an online emotional support community, so an employee can interact with a fellow human being who is prepared to listen to them and be there for them when they are stressed or not happy. The system has over 2,000 trained listeners and after each interaction, the user can rate the listener on a 5 star system. This app can also be used for personal use.
Happydonia is an internal communication app designed to track and improve the happiness of employees. It was created to help integrate teams and to reduce the loss of employees. Some of the features on the app are ,”Today I feel” which measures the user’s response to the work environment or a Happy-O-Meter which measures how happy an employee feels. This app has chat groups, folders to manage payroll and work documents and much much more.
Headspace is an award winning meditation and sleep app that has hundreds of meditations on a wide range of topics, from stress to anxiety to sleep. The Headspace team has created a corporate programme that helps companies introduce their employees to the app and its benefits in order to monitor their well-being and to encourage them to engage. The reasoning behind this is that if stressed employees meditate more, they’ll be happier at work, thus boosting productivity. According to the company, 30 days of Headspace use has shown a 32% reduction in the stress levels of the user, while also noticeably improving concentration.
If you or your employees are averse to using technology to manage and boost their happiness and productivity there is a much simpler way :
“ … you don’t really need free muffins, company scooters, and a billiards room to keep people happy in the workplace. All it takes is a good deal of genuine consideration for their wants and needs. The actions taken thereafter by an organisation is what builds the kind of culture that persuades people to invest themselves in their company of choice.” – Spyros Yiassemides, Partner, Yiassemides & Co, Cyprus, a chartered accounting firm that takes pride in its people-centred practice .
By Tumelo Mojapelo
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About Tumelo
As Head of Content and Foresight Facilitator, Tumelo Mojapelo oversees and directs the
research undertaken and content generated by the Flux Trends team. With a wealth of
knowledge and experience in the trends analysis space, her mission is to empower
entrepreneurs and business people to make better decisions through an understanding of trends – how seemingly unrelated factors and events have the potential to disrupt current business models and society.
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Image credit: Rawpixel AND The Happy Movement AND Nunsy AND Medium/ David. A. Chang
