Workhuman has announced that Intermediate Capital Group has become an investor after buying 10% of the equity from selling shareholders for $120m.

Workhuman says that five million employees around the world are on its platform, across 160 countries.

The company was founded as Globoforce by Eric Mosley (pictured) and Eddie Reynolds in Dublin in 1999, and rebranded last year.

With private equity backing, in 2018 Workhuman’s revenue increased by a third to $450m, and net profit almost tripled to $24m. The company’s software products include rewards and engagement programmes for employees, and clients include Cisco and LinkedIn.

Office watercooler moments might be a thing of the past for now but Workhuman is offering a digital alternative. The company is making its workplace connectivity software free to use until March 2021, as well as launching a new emotion-tracking product for employers.

In Association with

Life Events enables lonely employees share personal milestones with colleagues on an interactive, Facebook-type platform. Live Events can be used to share comments and photos, and can record employees’ reactions in real time.

A separate product called Conversations is billed as continuous performance management software. Managers can crowdsource feedback, organise group check-ins, align goals and track team engagement.

Then there’s the recently-launched Moodtracker. This lets employers monitor and analyse their staff members’ moods remotely through potentially unlimited surveys, each geared to assess specific emotional characteristics.

The company explains: “Keep a constant pulse on your people. Use automation features to ‘set it and forget it’ so surveys run continuously. Our behavioural psychologists developed the surveys based on analysis of 50 million moments of employee connection from Workhuman data. AI and Natural Language Processing are already baked in.”

The surveys are designed to measure employee productivity, stress levels, resilience and other metrics. They also allow companies to benchmark their staff against other organisations using the Workhuman goodies.

“It’s incredibly important that employee lives are being recognised and celebrated, gratitude and optimism is being shared, and managers have ongoing check-ins with their people,” says Mosley.

Employing c.600 people, Mosley can point to his own business as proof of concept. The business has garnered numerous Great Place to Work awards, though perhaps too much Moodtracker might dull the workplace mood going forward.