An employee perks company is investing in new technology to ‘close the loop’ on employee happiness.
London-based Perkbox has made a name for itself with a service which offers around 250 ‘perks’, including discounts and freebies to employees of subscribed businesses.
The company’s clients include OpenTable, Nandos, Hawksmoor, Rentalcars and Levi Strauss & Co.
Ben Leeds, director of product and engineering at Perkbox, admits that ‘employee happiness’ is a broad term, but hopes that its ’employee sentiment technology’ will improve working life as well.
“Perks are just one cog in a large machine,” Leeds told BusinessCloud.“There are many more areas that we can’t address just with technology, but we hope to address these through content sharing and thought leadership.”
The company, which has already raised over £11 million in funding, is now researching how the most functional and successful companies fix internal problems like team communication and motivation.
One of the company’s upcoming features, which is currently being tested with 18 of its clients, “sends out surveys regularly and measures the pulse of the employees”, says Leeds.
“We then take that data, anonymise it, and we bring it in to a dashboard with graphs for the business leaders.
“We want the system to interpret the data coming in. It’s an incredibly tough product to get right. You can’t bodge it.”
Perkbox’s own employees, made up of 90 per cent millennials, are testing the features internally.
“Our company is surveyed every two weeks and communication is our lowest-scoring driver right now. We want the system to recommend ideas,” said Leeds.
The company, which has 500,0000 users, is also improving the suggestions of its existing perks with the power of machine learning.
“The machine learning model that we’re training is going to be a huge step forward for us,” Leeds explained.
“We’ve done a couple of proof of concepts over the last few months, around machine learning and collaboration.
“Machine learning is an area we’re really investing in at the moment and the machine learning model that we’re training is going to be a huge step forward for us.”
The company now has its sights set on internationalisation with its first steps in France.