Two new tools make sure your employees’ opinions are heard

People used to give their employers feedback by shoving slips of paper into wooden suggestion boxes. Technology has moved those suggestions boxes online where employees can more effectively have their voices heard. Happiily and 15Five are two new employee-feedback services that were introduced Thursday at the Launch Conference in San Francisco.

Happiily keeps opinions anonymous

With Happiily, workers can give anonymous feedback about their company. Employees are asked several questions about how much confidence they have in the company, how they feel in their job, and how they think the company is being run.

Business owners and managers can view the collected survey responses. They can use the data to make changes, even compare results to events that have taken place in the company to find correlations — for example hiring a new employee or partnering with a new service. Happiily is currently raising a seed round for $500,000.

15Five creates short-and-fast weekly employee reports

15Five is a similar concept to Happiily, but it removes the anonymous part and drills down into feedback responses. 15Five has weekly reports with five questions chosen by a company’s higher-ups. Each employee fills out their report, which should take no more than fifteen minutes. Answers can be as long or as short as employees want, and they are encouraged to leave both positive and negative feedback.

Business managers can then review the answers, which should take no more than five minutes of their time says 15Five. Once a manager reviews each employee’s weekly report, they can leave feedback and flag important answers that are pulled together into a report for the CEO. The CEO gets an aggregated report with feedback that the manager felt was relevant or needed immediate action.

15Five touts the tool  “removes the face-to-face intimidation factor that employees can feel when approaching their managers.” At the presentation, David Sacks of Yammer said that he’d be an angel investor in the company.

Happiily competes with existing employee feedback companies such as Inquisite and Confirmit, both of which serve employee survey questions and provide insights based on the answers. 15Five competes the typical internal weekly-reports that many companies use, often created in-house by the company.

Each company presented its idea Thursday at the Launch Conference to a panel of judges (shown above), which included Tim Lee from Sequoia Capital, David Sacks from Yammer, Naval RaviKant from AngelList, and Stefan Weitz from Bing.