There’s no doubt that workplace happiness and productivity falls under the remit of Human Resources, but more often than not, HR professionals get bogged down in admin and paperwork meaning happiness and productivity either get ignored or delegated to other members of staff.
We’ve found 6 of the best tools you can use to track and improve happiness and productivity among your teams.
1. TINYpulse
The antidote to long and boring employee satisfaction surveys, TINYpulse sends weekly emails to everyone on your team asking 1 question about happiness or engagement.
Employees also get the chance to make anonymous suggestions and send a ‘virtual pat on the back’ to colleagues using the Cheers for Peers feature.
Perfect for creative, fast moving teams who want to have some fun with their feedback
Prices start from $49/month for up to 15 users
Pro tip: Expect questions like “If they were making a movie about your organization, which actor or actress should play your CEO and why?” and “If you had to describe your company as an animal, what animal would it be” (alongside more average “on a scale of 1-10 how happy are you style questions).
2. Hppy
While TINYpulse is a great for capturing a quick overview of your teams’ happiness, Hppy lets you dig a little deeper.
Like TINYpulse, Hppy allows anonymous feedback and peer to peer feedback with their Thank You feature.
Additional features include being able to ask your team specific questions, tracking and monitoring your team’s moods and a handy data-driven dashboard to give you a quick company overview of happiness and engagement.
Prices start at $2/month/user
Pro tip: Hppy requires a little more buy in from your team than TINYpulse but it’s definitely worth a go if you’re looking for a more in depth overview of company happiness.
3. iDoneThis
iDoneThis is a nice, clean and simple system to help teams track their everyday progress.
With iDoneThis, team members are sent a reminder email every evening. Your team simply reply to the email with a list of things they’ve done that day. The next morning, you get a digest of everyone’s progress the previous day.
iDoneThis also offers a peer to peer feedback function where you can share your teams’ achievements and send thanks to colleagues.
Prices start at $5/user/month
Pro tip: iDoneThis is an easy system to use but getting your team on board might not be so easy. Spend time and effort implementing it as part of your whole team’s workflow to maximize the benefits.
4. Kudos
Kudos is a tool for making sure you give your employees the recognition and rewards they deserve.
With Kudos, anyone on your team can send private or public feedback or recognition to any one of their coworkers. What really sets Kudos apart though, is it’s rewards feature...
KudosRewards lets your team members redeem their Kudos Points for eGift cards with a number of retailers, restaurants and charities.
A free plan is available. The cheapest paid plan is $1/user/month.
Pro tip: Kudos is highly customizable so take the time to explore how to create the best experience for your team. Use Zendesk? Try integrating with Kudos to give feedback and recognition to your support team from directly within the Zendesk platform.
5. Campfire
Campfire is a private chat room for group chat between colleagues. Okay, it’s not exactly an HR app, but it’s definitely beneficial for happiness and productivity.
With Campfire you can set up different rooms for different topics or projects so you don’t have to bombard the whole company with questions about a particular project.
We find that Campfire minimizes the amount of office noise so we can still communicate, without interupting everyone.
Prices start at $12/month.
Pro tip: We use Flint, a Mac client for Campfire so we can keep chat separate from our browsers and send notifications to the people we’re messaging.
6. Contactzilla
Here at Contactzilla, we’re taking the pain out of contact management for business and organisations.
Contactzilla allows you to import contact details from your email, social networks and CSV files and sync your contacts with all of your devices.
With Contactzilla, you can share your address books with colleagues so everyone has access to up-to-date contact details for customers, clients, suppliers, freelancers etc.
We recommend creating a staff address book so everyone has contact details for all of their coworkers, making it easy for them to get together outside of work and form relationships outside the office that will help them collaborate better in work.
A free plan is available. The cheapest paid plan is $7/month for 3 multi-user address books with access for up to 50 people.
Pro tip: Make sure to sync your Contactzilla address books with your phone. Every time someone changes details in Contactzilla, they will automatically be updated in your phone.
What are your favourite HR apps?