Employees Find Trulia Happiness

Sami is the coo & co-founder of trulia, a real estate search engine that people (like me) find homes for sale. This from his blog:

Employee happiness dashboard - Really?

We typically have a small group lunch with all new employees and one of the questions I often ask is “What is different at Trulia? What can we do better?” Erika, offered an eye-opening response yesterday: “During my career, I’ve never worked for a company that surveys and listens to all the employees on a regular basis, not to mention shares all the results with the entire company in an all-hands meeting.”

I thought that – tuning into employee happiness - was what every respectable organization does in a professional environment, where the most valuable assets of the company walk out the door every evening (sometimes in the morning). We even have fresh new Harvard University backed research proving that happiness is actually contagious between people.

So they started asking, ranking (on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the best) and tracking 2 simple questions from August 2005 until November 2008:

• I like to go to work every morning
• Work at Trulia is fun

Here's what he has to say about the results:
Overall we have had very high “happiness” scores throughout our company life, about 4.25 on a 1 to 5 scale, which is especially impressive considering we have grown rapidly from just 4 people to about 85 today as well as moved offices three times during this period

- We’ve noticed some annual cyclicality tied into summer time, all company off-site event and holiday season
- Our team reacted into the overall economic downturn and dozens of other (online) media companies’ aggressive lay-offs; after we announced that we would not do lay-offs, but continue hiring selectively, the index bounced back again (last month)

While we may not be able to reduce the secret of happiness to a single number (and hopefully never will!), we have found that these anonymous surveys are an invaluable tool in adjusting and improving our culture, as well as other company practices to stay on the right growth track!

My favorite part of Sami's blog was found at the end --

How’s your daily happiness and excitement level when you walk into your office? If you’re looking for something, possibly greener grass, check out our jobs page.

This "always be selling" approach to blogging and jobbing was really great, especially for a bean counter. But may I just say that with such a great culture and story, I think the Jobs page could be better?

I guess I'm always blogging and selling too.

BRANDEMiX adds Trulia to my list of companies to watch.