News release overview
"Happiness App" Proved to Improve Vertical, Horizontal, and Diagonal Communication at Workplace, Aiming to Lower Mental Health Risks
Tokyo, August 9, 2022 – Happiness Planet, Ltd. ("Happiness Planet") and Hitachi, Ltd. ("Hitachi") have proven that "Happiness Planet Gym,"*1 an application service offered by Happiness Planet to support organizational management, was effective in improving communication among employees, which affects the risks of mental illness, even for organizations where employees are working remotely and have little chance of seeing each other in person.
It is now clear that organizations with a high risk of mental illness tend to lack not only vertical communication between a manager and a subordinate but also horizontal and diagonal communication across the teams and/ or hierarchical levels*2. Happiness Planet developed a function, "automatic formation of cheer-up teams," capable of intentionally forming the "Triangular Connection" of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal communication. It is offered as one of the features of "Happiness Planet Gym" launched in May 2022. This feature automatically forms a team of three to four members who are vertically, horizontally, or diagonally connected with each other. Each member is encouraged by the app (a feature named "Happiness advisor") to declare one's positive goal for the day and send each other messages to cheer for other team members. (Figure 1)
Happiness Planet and Hitachi jointly conducted Proof of Concept (PoC) to verify the effectiveness of the automatic formation of cheer-up teams with an organization of about 250 employees, which was divided into two groups. First, members of both groups freely chose someone they would like to cheer for and sent supportive messages to the person for one month, and then communicative connections generated in each group were observed. Next, for the following one month, one group rooted for other members in the same manner, while the other group rooted for team members chosen by the automatic formation of cheer-up teams, and then changes in the communicative connections generated in each group were analyzed. Results showed that the communication structure of the group that continued to cheer for one another in the same manner remained almost unchanged, while in the other group that rooted for other members chosen by the feature, 33% of the members, who had previously tenuous connection with people around them, were able to establish a new "triangular connection". (Figure 2)
These results raise the expectation that the feature may improve workplace communication and thus help reduce the risk of mental illness among employees.
Happiness Planet and Hitachi will continue to work together to accelerate initiatives for enhancing wellbeing of the society and endeavor to support people's quality of life with data and technologies that fosters a sustainable society.
*1 For more information on "Happiness Planet Gym," please see https://happiness-planet.org/
*2 For the results of the joint research on the association between depressive symptoms and communication structures in the workplace by Hitachi, Happiness Planet, and Tokyo Institute of Technology published in Scientific Reports published by Nature, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14366-9 (published online on June 17, 2022). Lee, JH., Sato, N., Yano, K., Miyake, Y., Universal association between depressive symptoms and social-network structures in the workplace. Sci Rep 12, 10170 (2022).
Figure 1 Automatic formation of cheer-up teams to form a "Triangular Connection" of communication
Figure 2 Change in social network structures brought by the automatic formation of cheer-up teams
