We all love a cute animal, and animal memes were sent amongst friends and colleagues even before the days of social media (anyone remember receiving icanhazcheezburger memes?). So when the team from Mandai X asked us if we wanted to send Mandai animal memes to each other in the office, we obviously said yes!
Just kidding, that’s not what they really said. We were kindly invited to take part in a pilot programme to test Mandai X’s new programme, Happie Habitat. It is a tool for employee engagement and activities, that aims to improve employee well-being through personalised self-help content.
Animal memes are highly relatable and fun and one of the activities was a meme generator that we could use to send encouragement, kudos, and kind words to each other. Our first thoughts were that it was a good icebreaker, or tension releaser.
Users of the programme could also answer questions related to their well-being at work, in order to receive self-help tips and suggestions. Our first concern about that was privacy, and whether employees could be totally honest. But we were assured confidentiality and the purpose of the programme was to get a sensing on the team’s current mental state and mood in any case.
Our Design Principal, Gwen, felt this was an excellent opportunity for our staff based overseas to join in some of the office fun, by taking part in something we could all do together. We even had a session where they dialed in and we read what we wrote for each other.
However, to be honest, it was a challenge getting our colleagues to take part in the pilot programme. With everyone’s packed schedules, not many of us had the mental capacity during our pockets of breather time to sit down and focus on how we were feeling at a point in time. But otherwise, we still managed to have fun generating hilarious animal memes and sending it to each other.
The Mandai X team informed us about planned improvements to the program, which will incorporate more nature elements into the platform. They shared that this enhancement aims to help every individual benefit from deeper connections to nature daily. That would definitely be fun!
Thank you Mandai X for having us on the programme and we look forward to the final version of the product!
