Employee happiness? There's an app for that

A new app for Apple and Android claims to help employees learn what will make them happier at work, and how to make it happen.

The app, developed by a New Zealand tech start-up, was designed to help employees identify what their values are at work and to decide whether their current employer is fulfilling these. “It’s about talent helping themselves to make their current job more fulfilling and to make them more engaged and productive,” Mark Kidd, director – Happy@Productions, told Unlimited. “If they know the things that are working well and the things that aren’t working so well, it gives them the tools to work better,” he added.

The app aims to accomplish this by asking the employee 22 targeted questions, such as “How much do you value Job Related Training at your workplace?” It takes ten minutes to complete and, at the end, some interesting statistics are revealed. These include, how happy the employee is at work (and how he or she compares with others), how engaged he or she is, and his or her flight risk over a one and two year period.

It also provides a breakdown of the things that the employer does well and not so well, providing practical and ‘proven’ advice regarding what can be done to improve the employment situation.

The app took around four months to develop, but was based on more than ten years of research that involved hundreds of employers and thousands of candidates.

And it’s not only your own employees that will benefit from the app. The website states that a proportion of the proceeds generated from sales of the app will go to ‘life saving’ charities.