Happeo
Happier Workforces through Better Communication

The essence of a high-performing digital culture is its ability to align internal communications with business priorities. Communications take place through different channels, which help employees share, innovate, work and socialize, and if they can achieve these without toil, the organization will nurture happy employees. This is the driving concept behind Happeo, a one-of-a-kind software company that strives to create happier employees by enabling them to collaborate on projects, forge bonds with colleagues, and making their voice heard.

In an interview with CIO Applications Magazine, Niko van Eeghen, VP of Product at Happeo, shares his insights on how their company is helping redefine the modern-day business collaboration.

Could you walk us through some background on Happeo and its position in the market?

From our perspective, there has been a powerful shift from location-based work to a kind of “work from anywhere,” principle, even before the pandemic. This has meant that companies have started to rely a lot more on asynchronous communication, i.e., communicating and moving projects forward without the need for additional stakeholders to be available at the same time. This makes it difficult to chat with your colleagues at the office or organize meetings on the run, forcing companies to discover new ways to organize themselves. From our perspective, the best way to organize asynchronous communication is to structure it around three different categories. The first is static content, the second is rapid communication, and the third is dynamic communication.

Static communication is slow and one to many; it is writing a piece and sharing it with the organization without regular updates. Onboarding information or yearly company strategy and goals fall into this category.

On the other hand, rapid communication is swift, one to one or maybe even one to a team, with a short lifespan. This category includes instances where someone asks a question and gets an immediate answer.

We see a kind of a middle ground in dynamic communication. While it is speedier than rapid communication, it is not as slow as static communication. With this understanding, we solve this unique need in the market. For static content, we have a proprietary intranet approach. On the other hand, we have deep integration with Slack for rapid communication, helping users easily access and send messages to their colleagues.

Additionally, we look at dynamic communication in the form of channels, making it very easy for employees to choose the right way to communicate through one platform. This helps avoid creating information silos and ensures that communication happens through Happeo, allowing anybody in the organization to access those discussions rather than having them sit in different tools distributed from each other. And so, since we have shifted to a “work from anywhere” model, where bringing information to one home is far more important than having things spread out, Happeo facilitates everything from static to rapid communication.

Please throw more light on the Happeo solution. What makes it a unique differentiator in the collaboration space?

Our solution is all about getting departments to work more effectively together. On the one hand, it handles static information, i.e., making organizational information relevant and easily accessible. On the other hand, you also have the teams using some kind of document/content creating tools.

For instance, if you think of creating a digital workspace or onboarding a new employee, the company must identify the types of information your team or new employee needs access to. By integrating a page with a dashboard, you can track how your team is performing against goals, making the dashboard a valid entry point for sales. Alternatively, the dashboard can be an entry point towards Salesforce, where you can see an overview of the deals, or provide access to a set of objectives or tasks that you might have in, say, Asana that you will refer to in the next couple weeks. Happeo is providing the entry point access to all those tools and applications that you use on a day-to-day basis by integrating them into a page. Native experiences can be integrated into our Pages product, enabling you to add on Salesforce capabilities and the like. Also, every employee who is already logged into our dashboard can interact with all of the content that is available on it. The employer can update the information on that dashboard as they like. No user needs to jump into Salesforce unless they want to. Happeo will provide access to everything at your fingertips.

Beyond Pages, Channels is our secure and social environment where every colleague can post messages and share ideas or comments, tag, and like posts regardless of where they are.

Channels make it easy for users to ask for information from other organizational parts and enable teams to meet, socialize, and collaborate. We have set up an ‘ask sales,’ ’ask product’ or an ‘ask marketing’ channel for each department. The channels help provide users with answers to specific questions they have asked various departments, relieving them all to one place where you can ask those questions. And similarly, there is also an internal product, sales or marketing section, where you can separate discussions inside the team and create a very simple, straightforward place for everybody to ask questions.

Could you tell us a customer success story? One that highlights how you have worked with a client in the past?

One of our clients, DocLib, is a rapidly growing organization that went from being a startup to a large organization. The company used about 16 different intranet solutions that were not very tied together. As a result, each department had its own source of information distributed, and it became very hard for their employees to find information from one location, making things difficult for the 2000+ people organization. By working with us, they introduced Happeo as their single place of contact to store that information and distribute it. We could make things easily searchable across the organization because it is all in one tool. Consequently, we were able to shift from an ask culture, to a self-serve model without needing to take the time to poke around, making it a lot cheaper for the employees to gain access to the information they need to do their job.

Our philosophy is that we believe future organizations need to be far more bottoms up, i.e., create far more autonomy in the teams. This means that everybody in the organization needs to be able to support creating knowledge, and updating information so that people have access to the latest rather than only what is available to the centralized team.

Consequently, it becomes far easier to maintain that source of truth when everybody contributes towards that single resource, rather than just a few select people, which is important in remote or a hybrid remote setting.

What does the future hold for Happeo?

One major focus for us will be the US, which is a big source of growth. We are very strong in Europe today, where we have some customers who are our early adopters, with larger customers across the entire North America region. We have also established an office in New York, and have salespeople across the east and the west coast to support customers. Happeo is also scaling its support, and our customer success team is there to build a local presence. In addition, we are aggressively hiring developers and engineers, growing out the company, while heading towards a series B over the next year or so.