Building a Culture of Belonging

By Adam Turner

Michelle Stinson Ross, co-founder of mental health technology company Mindful Appy, wants companies to understand the “why” behind employee turnover and customer purchasing habits, and the key to understanding these behaviors, Ross said, lies in emotional data. To that end, she and her fellow co-founders Tina Schweiger and Richard Bagdonas created Mindful Appy to be able to collect emotional data using the universal language of the 2020s: emojis.

Mindful Appy launched two years ago amidst the pandemic with the goal of “providing emotional data in actionable forms,” Ross said. “We came out of the pandemic as a response to the realization that mental and emotional health in the workplace is really important, and people need to express themselves in ways that are valid and real while protecting their psychological safety.”

The app allows for the collection of information while protecting an employee’s safety by aggregating and anonymizing the results of text message-based data collection. Employees at a company using Mindful Appy will receive a text once a day asking them a question like, “What emoji best represents how your coworkers make you feel like you belong?” and employees can respond with any emoji they would like. That emoji is then categorized based on the emotion attached to the response, and the employer receives a report of the moods across the company.

For example, an employee could respond to the belonging question with the crying emoji, which Mindful Appy interprets as an employee being sad or discontent in response to the question. This data is then presented to the employer in a myriad of ways, including the average company mood through the Net Emotional Index, which is a ranking from -100 to 100 that indicates the mood of the organization. Mindful Appy also produces a word cloud of moods that range from happy to frustrated to confused, giving employers a clearer view about how they feel regarding the question.

All this information comes together to give company leaders a picture of their organization’s culture of belonging, which Ross said can help them further understand the experience of the employee and the underlying emotional discontent that leads to high turnover. By analyzing the emotional data collected through technologies like Mindful Appy, company leaders can see how well employees feel like they belong and begin to understand that there is more to turnover than just pay and benefits.

“Belonging might actually be the key to mitigating turnover,” Ross said. “It’s a lot harder to leave a job where you feel like you belong and have a connection not just to the business, but with the people you work with too. These people aren’t just your coworkers, you live a good chunk of your life with them.”

And by looking at data regarding when employees feel like they do and do not belong, company leaders have the opportunity to change the culture and, hopefully, get more people to stay.

“We need to look at this emotional feedback as data points that we need to collect,” Ross said. “Think of it as big data coming full circle. There’s lots of behavioral data, and now we’re advocating marrying that behavioral data with actual emotional data, so we understand why people behave the way they do.”

Call For Study Participants!

The Mindful Appy team invites you to participate in a scientific study observing whether Unicode emojis can be used to quickly measure mood. If you are interested in learning more, please visit https://mindfulappy.com/study-recruiting.