Noon, the journey so far
Being a Dutchie, we are used to celebrating Labour Day the 1st of May. We thought it would be fitting to pick this year’s Labour Day to launch Noon to all laborers out there, on our mission to safeguard the well-being of them all around the globe.
Thanks to our 10 launching partners, Noon immediately received loads of feedback. What did using Noon feel like in the real world? Obviously, we received the feedback with open arms. It was heartwarming that people actually care enough to have an opinion about their experience using the product.
On a mission
First, let me explain what Noon is all about. Suffering from the severe negative impact of chronic work-related stress ourselves, we made it our mission to prevent stress-related mental health issues from happening. Since we learned that stress especially plays a destructive part in the life of young ambitious professionals populating startups and scale-ups, we decided to serve those teams (and team leads) first. We designed Noon for daily use in the most lightweight way we could think of.
1. We send out a reflection a day that takes users less than a minute to digest and react to. 2. Noon is trained to quickly spot what stresses people and what it is that energizes them. 3. Our goal is to serve teams with insights pinpointed to course correct, addressing the very roots of what stresses and hinders people, to prevent stress to build up to chronic levels.
What we aimed to do when building Noon
- Instead of introducing yet another tool, we decided to integrate with Slack, to offer an easy onboarding — login and account management experience.
- By serving just a question a day we aimed to be minimally disruptive to team focus and productivity, while still being able to understand what is going on on a daily basis. We grouped our questions based on what we learned from scientific research, proving 6 Areas to be the most impactful when it comes to safeguarding well-being on the job.
- By translating reflections into data and by showing trends on dashboards we aimed to expose root causes for stress, instead of exposing the people who indicate to suffer from it.
What we learned so far
Insights from day one
The moment people leads hit the button ‘Add to Slack’ we learned it takes this admin user about 5 minutes to complete the onboarding, including inviting all team members to join. From the very start, people receive a question a day, coming from Noon as an integrated part of their Workspace. We learned that it takes users around 7 seconds to respond to the daily reflections. The response that team members provide automatically translates into insights on personal and team levels. This whole process is fully automated, leading to insights from day one.
Bold & confrontational reflections
Using Noon reflecting becomes a daily habit. By interacting, we lift the user outside the day-to-day routine for a couple of seconds to reflect on another level than they are used to when busy with their daily tasks. ‘Are people honest at work?’ is just one of the examples. We learned that people find the question confrontational in a good way. Team members mentioned it forces them to take a step back from what they are doing and take a look in the mirror, as an individual, as a team, and as an organization. Our statistics show that people like to interact with the reflections, resulting in high engagement rates, hovering around 75% engagement on a daily basis.
Team & Individual → Privacy first
Noon offers users a safe space to reflect on their relationship with work and how it evolves over time. Next to personal insights, we also visualize team sentiment, which is designed in a way that individual team members can see how they compare with the rest of the team. We show stressors and resources from a team perspective, based on anonymized data, so team efforts center around addressing stressors hindering team performance.
Scoring & Benchmarking
We proved to be successful in safeguarding safety when showing data but translating data into insights on the dashboard appeared to be a confusing exercise for some. We learned to provide more context to our scoring mechanism when tying a score of 55 to a Worklife Area like Workload. Based on user feedback, we added text and features that explained the scoring better, providing insights into how sentiments and scores are linked.
Next steps
Personalize the reflections
We know how complex and multidimensional emotions are, people experience on the job. The success of Noon depends on how good we are at capturing and analyzing sentiments the very moment people experience them. What’s also important is to evaluate its impact over time. In order to stay on top of our game, we keep tailoring our reflections to people’s needs. This includes a new feature enabling people to start reflecting whenever they feel the need for it, about what they are currently experiencing, and show the impact over time.
Assisting teams to improve
From the very first day teams join Noon we provide insights like what energizes a team and what areas and topics stresses them. We show what causes the stress, so teams are able to course correct.
Noon just released monthly and weekly reports to facilitate teams in their weekly and monthly cycle of overseeing results, pinpointing to what needs be improved first and offering suggestions on what to do next. If you want to try it out yourself, join us at https://noon.work/ for a 14-day free trial and see how Noon makes a difference! See you over there! 👋
