“Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger
More than ever, hour after, our work is never over”
[Ante-scriptum: This article is best read while listening to Daft Punk]
Society, our bosses, and even Daft Punk tell us to work harder and be more productive, at any cost. In recent years, however, companies have begun to realize that productivity at any cost can be unproductive. To remedy this, they have started to introduce greater flexibility and more perks at the office.
If you are on the same wavelength and eager to enhance the well-being at your office, here is our selection of exclusive tools and startups that you’ll soon find indispensable.
Good&Co – find your match
The hiring process is always a sensitive subject for companies. It can be long and costly, especially if the candidate you end up hiring turns out not to be the right fit for the company. The best candidate is not just the smartest or the most creative person, but the one who best complements your company and your current employees, and who makes your team stronger ;)
Good&Co is half matchmaker, half headhunter. Based on a proprietary psychometric algorithm, the platform helps job seekers identify their core strengths and professional persona, to assess whether they’ll be a good fit for a company. As the founders say, “It’s only when a job feels like it was made for you that work feels less like work and more like play. Productivity and success follow naturally”.
iceScrum – get your company to the next (agile) step
If you want to do it faster, make it more flexible.
Whatever your company’s current level of organizational agility, iceScrum is the project management software for you. Based on the pillars of scrum (transparency, inspection, and adaptation), it allows you to get a global overview of your project, and it automatically produces analyses and calculates productivity.
iceScrum integrates with the tools essential to the success of your projects: Jira, Github, Slack… It also helps your teammates collaborate on projects across the world.
Weekdone – turn planning and goal setting into a game
With Weekdone, you can make achieving goals feel like a game. Weekdone lets you create, share, and assign objectives at company, department, team, and individual levels so that everyone will be on the same page. Teammates can share information and help each other, using a straightforward and elegant interface.
Need another reason? Weekdone uses the same Objective and Key Results (OKR) methodology used by world-leading companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Twitter – and we know they just can’t be wrong.
Noisli – boost productivity … with noise
Did you know that noise can actually be better for productivity than total silence?
It may feel counter-intuitive, but studies show that productivity levels are higher when people are working in a coffee shop surrounded by a background buzz of conversation than in a quiet, empty room. But the level of noise has to be just right – a bar playing Daft Punk as loud as in a club may not be so effective, with the exception being the writing of this article.
Noisli is a background noise generator that helps drown out annoying noises and lets you create your ideal environment for working and relaxing. Whether it be the sound of the wind, raindrops, fire, or the actual background noise of a coffee shop, you can choose the atmosphere that will make you focus best and boost your productivity.
Retrium – learn from your failures and successes
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… this is true if you actually learn from your mistakes.
That’s why the best companies take the time to review past projects, analyse what went wrong or could be improved upon, and share new ideas.
Retrium gives you the tools and methodology to run effective retrospectives and identify concrete, outside-of-the-box ideas on how to improve the way you work. It provides the space and opportunity for teammates to bring up topics that would normally stay buried – and teams love it.
TeamMood – discover your team members’ most secret thoughts
[Sorry if it looks a little bit like auto-promotion, but we couldn’t do this article without including TeamMood – after all, we are a tool for wellbeing at work]
How would you like to know your team members’ feelings and thoughts? Or to identify problems as they arise – and be able to handle them before they escalate? Or to get regular feedback and suggestions from your team members in order to continuously improve your organization?
That’s what TeamMood can do for you. Simply by sending a daily email to all of your team members, you can monitor their levels of happiness, collect their comments and be proactive should a problem arise.
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What do coffee, notepads and a ping-pong table have in common? The same person in your company is probably responsible for buying all of them, along with all the other everyday purchases for the office. Gathering requests and placing orders can be quite tedious for your office manager or personal assistant or whoever is charged with the task.
This is where Hivy comes in. Hivy is an office management platform that creates a unique workplace experience. With a web and smartphone app or through a simple Slack command, all the wonderful people in your office can submit requests and make suggestions using Hivy. Office managers can handle their projects and manage the building within the app: get IT support, catering for an event, a cleaning company, etc.
And with all the material and snacks they need/want, your team members can relax and focus on getting their work done.
[Exclusive] Briq – much more than a thank you
The specialists have weighed in: wellbeing at work is strongly correlated with peer recognition, and even more so with personalized, public, and recurring recognition. But you can’t really orchestrate peer recognition within your company.
That’s why the eFounders’ team has created a peer recognition tool, Briq, that allows teammates to thank, to congratulate someone or to cheer someone up with a simple Slack command. The briqs you receive can be used through a set of applications: Bootiq, to buy goodies from the company shop (a company hoodie, a one-month, 6-month, or yearly subscription to Spotify or the gym, etc.), Snacky, to get a coffee or a snack, and much more. Employees can also receive briqs from the company itself, for instance when they share a corporate article on their personal social media, or when they refer someone for an open position.
Briq is conceived to adapt to each company’s needs and uses: you can personalize the applications and even build you own ones to incentivize actions that matter to your business.
What started as an internal tool just turned into a project all of its own. Briq is still in private beta, but you can grab an invite here: www.givebriq.com. Enjoy!
Your turn
And you, do you have other tools for wellbeing at the office you’d like to share?