Show HN: Humetrical – An Improvement on Team Wellness

2 points

4 months ago

Late last year, my day job had an end-year leadership retreat. The one thing that really stood out to me, a line manager, was our speaker. She talked about the $50B wellness industry and how it was doing it wrong. How they give you $75 yoga stipends for the month, but don't actually address the critical people problems the company is blind to. How we're paid to ignore the problem and just accept that everything is ok.

Imagine this: You are a manager, under a director, trying to explain why things are grim. Your director tells their upper management things are fine. Your team is on absolute fire, because no one listens to them, and everyone above their manager thinks things are fine. Things are not fine. The director never does skip 1:1s. Or at best, they ask good questions when they are available, but don't touch on the heart of what the team is suffering from. This was my last year, literally - it sucked.

I've worked this industry for 26 years now. As of today, 10 years as an EM. Maybe my own problem is that I inject too much compassion into my teams, but the truth is, they are the reason I exist. Their success is my success. Why wouldn't I support them?

My own experience left a bitter taste in my mouth and I really wanted to fix it. So, I built https://humetrical.com over this winter. It's basic, but I'd like to think it hits a lot of points competitors don't. What the heck is the point of annual surveys? It's a single data point. Why not try for daily (or weekly, or specific day) questions that genuinely ask what is up with you, as an employee? That give a chance for leadership to see what they aren't seeing, should they care to look?

I'm using this with my own team right now every day. Originally, I was just doing this verbally using "traffic light colors" and recording it in my notes, but realized I wanted it automated and data points to show what was really going on. I'm not sure this will completely solve my own pain point unless I try to get the rest of my org to use it, but we'll see.

Anyway, I appreciate any feedback from the HN crowd, and am happy to discuss anything else in more detail. The tech stack is kind of boring: React, Rust, fly.io. I think this is the first time in my life I cared more about the product than the tech it took to build it.