After hearing from CEOs all over the globe that employee retention and contentment had become their greatest priority, he invented a simple but profoundly useful technology that teams in companies like Amazon, Ticketmaster, GlaxoSmithKline, JP Morgan, and GE have quickly embraced. In just nine months, 300 organizations have signed up to use it.Intrigued to learn how his new tool, TinyPulse, increases workplace happiness and thus employee retention, I recently met with Niu in Seattle. I spent the day visiting the company's clients, meeting with their CEOs, senior managers,In baseball, the "five-tool player"
and employees. What I discovered is that the methodology there is extraordinarily effective simply because it influences leaders to more consistently care for, develop, listen to, and appreciate employees--the practices known to have the greatest impact on inspiring human engagement and loyalty.
It remains common practice in most organizations to conduct an employee satisfaction survey usually with 50-plus questions once a year. Believing this approach is too broad, unfocused--and that too little ever gets done with the feedback--Niu chose to provide leaders with a steady "pulse" on employee happiness. As he told me, "Rarely have firms had access to an ongoing heartbeat--how their organization is doing or how specific groups are performing at any given moment in time."Every week, employees are e-mailed a survey that asks just one question. While the questions change each time, they almost always sample sentiments around morale, benefits, retention, and career progression. Many of the questions are fun and evocative.
The only question routinely repeated is perhaps its most important: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you at work?"TinyPulse manages the entire process so clients never know in advance what question will be asked and distributes results to company leaders just hours after each survey window is closed.Niu, who's a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and has an MBA from Wharton, is convinced that employee engagement is almost entirely driven by how people are made to feel in their jobs. Consequently, he's used both heart and mind to design the unique TinyPulse process.Niu wanted to encourage employees to fully express their feelings and concerns, and believed anonymity would ensure they felt no risk of pushback or retaliation. According to Forest Key, CEO of travel industry startup, Buuteeq, allowing employees to remain anonymous leads to different and far more valuable kinds of conversations.