Sodexo Benefits & Rewards Services Romania launches The Happiness Index, a neuroscience-based platform

Sodexo BRS Romania, operating on the local market of extra salary benefits, launches The Happiness Index, a service through which companies can find out in real-time, with the help of neuroscience, data and technology, how engaged and happy employees are at work and what they can do to increase their degree of satisfaction. The service is firstly launched by the group Sodexo Benefits & Rewards in Romania, as an innovation in the HR area, in the measurement of the wellbeing in companies.

In Romania, for almost 70% of employees, job satisfaction is the most important aspect of their lives – employees feel that they live more intensely when they are happy at work, according to a survey carried out this year by the recruitment platform BestJobs. Actually, professional fulfillment is more important than spending time with loved ones (48%), according to the same study.

The Happiness Index uses a range of neuroscience-based surveys that enables companies to understand how employees think, feel and behave. This innovative service created by the UK-based technology company The Happiness Index – Co-Founded by Matthew Phelan, Tony Latter, and Chris Hyland, measures the elements that motivate employees, make them happy and enable their development at work. With the help of data obtained and analyzed in real-time, companies can create targeted action plans to improve employees’ satisfaction, increase retention, and team performance.

Some companies that already use The Happiness Index include Sodexo, Rocco Forte Hotels, Fitch Ratings, Unilever and Canary Wharf Group among others.

“This tool helps business leaders and HR professionals to become more effective and successful when it comes to their people related strategies, considering the recent increasing interest towards neuroscience, but also the sophistication of the HR area inside the organizations. Whether we are talking about a small or large organization, whether the blue-collar or white-collar area, a Romanian company or a multinational one, the challenges in the HR area have almost the same level of complexity. Knowing in real time what is going on will help them to take quicker actions and anticipate business disruptions. Employees have gained ground and companies are making efforts to find out what motivates them and what would make them not leave in a challenging labor market context regarding the retention of the talented employees. Romania is a country with an accelerated rate of the ageing population and a very sensitive ratio regarding the active and inactive population, hence the need to diagnose in time and correctly any erosion of employee satisfaction so that the long-term talent retention to not be affected”, says Manuel Fernandez Amezaga, CEO of Sodexo BRS Romania & Bulgaria.

The employee retention is an extremely important factor for companies, especially since Romania has a strong population ageing trend, which means a disproportionate ratio between the number of employees and that of retirees. For example, in 2021 the ratio between the average number of retired persons and that of employees was 9 to 10, according to the data of the National Institute of Statistics. And these data have important territorial variations, also registering a report of 16 retired persons to 10 employees in one of the counties, according to the same report.

Also, due to the ageing population and the exodus of Romanians to Western Europe, Romania registers an important deficit of employees in fields such as services (especially IT), HoReCa, agriculture, and construction.

“This service fits the needs of all employers in Romania, and we assume that the first adopters will be those of the more than 2 million employees already using Sodexo cards. At the same time, there are companies that already use tools to measure employee engagement and those will be most likely to make an upgrade and also measure happiness, as an important factor for sustainable business performance. As the industry leader, it is our responsibility to move the market in the right direction, of enhancing the wellbeing of people, and this new launch is a proof point of our strategic commitment in this way. Nowadays, organisations are more and more aware that by impacting employees’ wellbeing we impact the overall country’s wellbeing and therefore we create the prerequisites for a better business ecosystem. It’s nothing more than a virtuous circle we create together”, adds Manuel Fernandez Amezaga, CEO of Sodexo BRS Romania & Bulgaria.

“The pandemic has changed the world forever. To survive and grow, organisations need to listen to their people and get a real-time picture of how happy and engaged they are. By measuring the key factors employees need to thrive at work, leaders can power their HR strategy and drive positive cultural change. Our neuroscience based platform uniquely measures the entire employee experience from new starters to leavers. This makes it a game changer for the Romanian market and we couldn’t be happier to be working with the Sodexo BRS team”, says Matthew Phelan, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of The Happiness Index.