Some firms are now realising that cultivating happier employees is both important and in their interests, and as a result have been trying to build a better understanding of employees’ needs and concerns. That’s created a market for firms offering employee mood analysis that draws on artificial intelligence, behavioural psychology and data science. Armed with this information, organisations then have a better chance of holding onto their top talent as well as managing attrition rates.
Technology at work
Once such company is Indian media firm House of Cheer. They teamed up with UK-based human insights company The Happiness Index to launch Happyness.me, a tool which analyses the thoughts and emotions of employees.
House of Cheer’s Namrata Tata explains that clients receive a “happiness audit” based on completed employee surveys. Companies can receive both an overall report on employees’ collective happiness and a bespoke “happiness quotient” which is measured via continuous assessment.
This assessment involves open survey technology that allows employees to give feedback 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The survey uses word clouds or other visual representations, as well as analysis of the average length and volume of comments from particular respondents. This data is summarised in real-time via simple dashboards that help leadership teams understand the current staff mood.
Yet a feedback survey might not be enough to assess the complexity of human emotion. That’s where having a conversation – albeit digitally – can be helpful. Amber, a chatbot developed by Indian analytics company inFeedo, is equipped with a sentiment analytics engine which can analyse an employee’s expressions and tone to determine their emotional state.
