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I’m a sucker for statistics. Typically anything that can be reduced to numbers, dashboards or charts, will do. How about weekly running distance for the past six years? Sure, I have a spreadsheet and chart for that. Distance scale omitted on purpose.

Given both of the Trulia founders have strong backgrounds in Physics, it may not come as a surprise that we have the entire Trulia business modeled as a dashboard on a single Excel spreadsheet. Each metric is updated at least on a daily basis and shared openly with key stakeholders, so that we can quickly react to changes and adjust the business levers behind every core metric. Sometimes these adjustments are subtle design changes on our web site, investments on our customer service or – even menu upgrades to our free Friday lunches.

Employee happiness dashboard - Really?

We typically have a small group lunch with all new employees and one of the questions I often ask is “What is different at Trulia? What can we do better?” Erika, offered an eye-opening response yesterday: “During my career, I’ve never worked for a company that surveys and listens to all the employees on a regular basis, not to mention shares all the results with the entire company in an all-hands meeting.”

I thought that – tuning into employee happiness - was what every respectable organization does in a professional environment, where the most valuable assets of the company walk out the door every evening (sometimes in the morning). We even have fresh new Harvard University backed research proving that happiness is actually contagious between people.

So what is it that we survey and Erica found so valuable? We started asking specific questions about employee happiness and motivation levels, among many other things, quickly after launching the company in 2005. Below is the “Pulse check” for two specific questions from August 2005 until November 2008. Please note that five (5.0) is the maximum level and one (1.0) is the lowest possible score. This chart is limited to 3-5 scale to show some detail in the result variation.

A few interesting observations about the results:

-    Overall we have had very high “happiness” scores throughout our company life, about 4.25 on a 1 to 5 scale, which is especially impressive considering we have grown rapidly from just 4 people to about 85 today as well as moved offices three times during this period
-    For the first few months we were only 5 or so people and when just one of the team members had a bad/superb day or week, the entire pulse results bounced like the Dow Jones in the past few weeks
-    We’ve also noticed some annual cyclicality tied into summer time, all company off-site event and holiday season
-    Our team reacted into the overall economic downturn and dozens of other (online) media companies’ aggressive lay-offs; after we announced that we would not do lay-offs, but continue hiring selectively, the index bounced back again (last month)

While we may not be able to reduce the secret of happiness to a single number (and hopefully never will!), we have found that these anonymous surveys are an invaluable tool in adjusting and improving our culture, as well as other company practices to stay on the right growth track!

How’s your daily happiness and excitement level when you walk into your office? If you’re looking for something, possibly greener grass, check out our jobs page.

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