We first created Niko Niko to understand how our employees and customers were feeling in our software company, Flatstack. Our thesis is that mood is a leading indicator for the metrics that are important in most businesses. It can be an early warning system for retention and performance.
We discovered Niko Niko calendars, which is an existing methodology in agile software development that we just built software around. (http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12...)
Max Webster, the CEO, will chime in here shortly. What we're working to establish now is the ROI of tracking and improving happiness in an organization, so we can validate that Niko Niko is a painkiller, not a vitamin.
We're finding the companies that are responding best either believe they have great cultures and want to invest in building culture, or they have just received negative data from an annual employee engagement and recognize they need to do something about their poor culture.
Love to hear everyone's feedback, its exciting to be on Product Hunt!
Interesting concept!
A few questions:
- How do you encourage your users/employees to log their mood on Niko Niko throughout the day?
- How do you encourage true reporting? It's easy to posit that an employee would input a positive mood, even if they were feeling negative — simply because they know another human is monitoring their behavior.
- Who is able to see behavior? Is this visible to the entire company, or a select few?
@extremelyn Good Q's, thanks!
- We try to encourage logging, by making it as easy / unobtrusive as possible. You can respond to 1-click in email, iOS push notification w. 1 swipe, or the Chrome extension. The goal is to make it the opposite of the pain-in-the-a** of completing an annual employee engagement survey. But getting people to submit their moods is def one of the biggest UI/UX challenges.
- I think this is a culture thing that is going to be different in each org, and even on individual teams. A lot of the analysis is done more based on outliers from the standard deviation of a person's norm.
- It can be wide open, or pretty locked down from an anonymity standpoint - different companies run it different ways, depending on size and culture.
@cschultz Thanks for the reply! I like your concept of detecting outliers — seems to be a good way to begin to developing trust with users. Sounds like your team has some interesting UX challenges ahead!
Best of luck :)
@tdavidson, thanks for your question! We have three major groups of users. Our earliest adopters were agile software teams like the folks at Leading Agile who were already familiar with or tracking their moods with pen-and-paper Niko Niko calendars. We're also helping large companies (250+ employees) like Compass Professional Health Services collect regular employee pulse. Finally, we're working with top corporate coaches like Christine Porath who use our real-time data to tailor their coaching with their clients.
We can't announce it yet, but we're very excited to add two new big customers in the next month: one is a major software company and the other a major non-profit. Stay tuned :)
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