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    • The science of emoticons- A new look at employee engagement

    Everyone has seen the Universal pain management tool: You know what I am talking about… The tool at the doctor’s office or the hospital that asks you to assess on a scale of 1 to 10 how bad your pain is. This summer is probably the first time I spent quality time assessing and thinking deeply about the versatile tool. The fact that I had to be in and out of the hospital all summer for a relative going through surgeries might partially explain my fascination with the pain assessment tool.
    Even after the health crisis passed I found myself constantly thinking back about the tool. The beauty and the versatility of the tool was in its simplicity. Two core aspects of the tool were equally important. 1 – Personalized assessment of emotions. 2- Proactive management of issues.
    The assessment is purely relative and personal. Someone’s 3 could be another person’s 5. Depending on the day of the week and what else happened on a particular day the same pain might look like a 6 today and a 4 tomorrow. 2 might be perfectly acceptable for someone as a norm, where as some people need it be to be less than 1 to feel normal. The feeling would keep changing depending on what time of the day you check. For a standardized tool, it is really personal in how it lets individuals express their emotions.
    The second part is the usage of this emotional assessment to do proactive management of one’s health. This is a way to to have a steady hand in turbulent times especially during a health crisis. It’s crucial to be have situational awareness of the what you are going through and be able to find some semblance of normalcy by yourself or with the help of people around you.
    We brought these insights back to work with us, as we were doing the product development for Zinda Journey, an employee engagement software.
    Trying to use static and standardized measures to determine engagement scores does not paint the full picture of engagement. It is like showing up late to a party and trying to sway the room to your way of thinking.
    Often times it’s too late to change perceptions as the memories of experiences are already set in.

    Organizations don’t have it easy these days. Regulations, disruptors in the industry, acquisitions, social media, brand image – just too many dimensions they need to juggle, not to mention the need to grow profitably. With the speed at which organizations are going today, there is a more proactive way of engaging teams from the beginning to create a collaborative and collective experience- In a way that makes people feel part of making history and feel highly engaged in the dialogue to create the future.

    Now on top of that if there is a better, real time way to assess people’s emotions – something that normalizes experiences across individuals to understand the collective organizational picture, then leaders have the knowledge and wisdom to lead their teams and their companies into the future.

    Our approach to the product has been based on these truths we believe to be fundamental to everyone.

    People want to have a say in their life, work and future.

    People are creative problem solvers and often what they are looking for is the definition of the problem itself.

    After crossing the threshold of reasonable compensation, people are looking for something they can make an impact in.
    Through our software we are looking to harness the collective strength of people, the biggest asset of any company, to take the company forward. A tool that provides the framework, tools and connections for success and also provides the flexibility for people to define their own success.
    Deepa Kartha Tuesday, October 25th, 2016Employee Engagement
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