Happy Our asks engaging questions of your employees that help them identify and document all the wonderful things they’re interested in which make them unique. Users can respond to the questions through chat and Happy Our automatically grabs the unique interests and tags them to the user’s profile.

We then cross-reference those unique interests and find the commonalities among your employees and use the shared interest as a reason to make an introduction. One person might say their favorite movie is Happy Gilmore and another might say they really loved the Mike Judge classic, Office Space – Happy Our recognizes that they are both into 90s comedies and can suggest that they may have other movies from that era that they both enjoyed. This is the beginning of how people discover that they have mutual interests that connect them and forms the foundation for having a new friend at work.

Happy Our also facilitates a very meaningful and valuable interaction between friends that just isn’t as easy to do while you’re working remotely – the spontaneous conversations which spring up when you and your work friends go to refill your coffee together! Happy Our provides an extremely easy way to quickly alert your friends that you’re going for a refill and invites them to join over a video call, just like they would if they were in the office and saw someone grab their cup and head for the kitchen. Spending 5 minutes sharing what you’re working on and thinking about is a truly effective way of maintaining cross-functional relationships and sharing information between different departments and teams.

These conversations can lead to massive leaps in productivity or ideation for employees – just think of all the times you learned of a helpful tip or heard an idea to try out from a colleague while casually passing in the cafeteria and exchanging notes on what you’re currently up to. This is part of the magic of being in a collaborative space with your co-workers, and we’ve now extended that experience to include people who can’t be in the same physical space with one another.

Finally, Happy Our can use the same interest information it has collected about your workers to facilitate a truly memorable happy hour event over video calls that can be inclusive of remote talent as well. Happy Our helps surface interesting information about the attendees and prompts them to share some of the stories they have, or it can suggest topics for discussion to the group to get the conversation started. In this way, it takes the awkwardness away from having a remote happy hour where nobody wants to break the silence and instead makes the event a great way to get to know more about the people you spend all day working with.

By finding good reasons for people to meet and begin a conversation, Happy Our removes the barriers which prevent most of us from forming those relationships in remote work scenarios.  It can be daunting to engage with a new person for the first time – Happy Our is that little nudge, along with a topic for conversation, that actually encourages communication between strangers in a way that increases the number of connected employees within your organization. Connected employees are 17x less likely to leave when a new opportunity comes along, and the benefits of retention are nearly immeasurable.

1https://hbr.org/2017/08/having-work-friends-can-be-tricky-but-its-worth-it