Richmond's goHappy is bridging the communication gap between corporations and their hourly employees.
Shawn Boyer, founder and chief executive officer of goHappy, was also a founder of the popular job searching website Snagajob, where companies post job listings for hourly positions. Though Boyer left Snagajob in 2013, he remained in contact with companies they worked with and through these relationships realized a need for better communication between organizations and their hourly workforce.
goHappy started off as a peer-to-peer communication channel meant to encourage conversation between friends and family. But late last year the team at goHappy Labs began communicating with more formal groups like student organizations and companies with requests to use the platform .
"We had recognized, even [while working at Snagajob], that there was this void in terms of how companies then communicated with those people once they were hired," Boyer said. "That then affected how valued and how connected the employees felt to those companies."
The six-person company decided to officially pivot their business focus in October. goHappy is now solely focused on helping these organizations more efficiently communicate with their hourly workforce, and the platform was modified to allow for a hierarchical framework that mirrors an organizational structure.
For example, a permission-based hierarchy can be set up so that corporate can send out messages to the entire company, regional managers can send messages to the employees in their domain, location managers can contact their immediate team, and so on through a two-way communication channel.
The other major change to their platform was the introduction of goAlerts - direct text messages corporate can send out to the entire company through SMS messaging. This one-way communication channel allows the spread of important organizational information quickly and effectively.
"We find that the employees appreciate so much that they're being communicated with by the company and how that makes them feel in terms of feeling valued and connected, which is essentially our mission statement," Boyer said, "It's pretty cool to see that actually happening."
The new goHappy platform is priced on a sliding-scale model that is either decided on a per-employee or per-location basis.
Despite the global economic downturn, Boyer said business remains solid for the company as clients adapt their own business models to reflect the new needs of a post-Covid world. goHappy continues to add new clients each week across a variety of industries like freight and logistics, restaurants, manufacturing, retail, contracting and even a ski resort.
"Some of our clients are thriving during the pandemic... Others have been negatively impacted, but that has just underscored for them the importance of being able to still communicate with hourly employees," he said. "When furloughed employees aren't coming into work every day, they still need to be able to get messages out, like communicating plans of action for reopening."
Boyer estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 employees are now on the platform after launching sales to organizations in early February.
As goHappy continues to grow its client base, the team hopes to also continue expanding the app's functionality to add new modules like surveying capabilities and other organizational necessities to act as a true one-stop-shop.
