Mood Monitoring

Introduction

Mood Monitoring lets you gather how your team is feeling on a regular basis and read it back as trends, without running a full survey each time. Employees answer a single question — "How are you feeling today?" — with one tap in a small banner inside brainyHR, and you see the results as an aggregated report. Individual answers are never shown; everything is reported as averages.

This guide covers how to turn the feature on, how to set up a monitoring, when and how employees are reminded, and — the part most worth reading carefully — how days and time zones are handled, because that is what decides who is asked and when.

Turning Mood Monitoring on
Creating a monitoring — the four choices
Who a monitoring reaches (audience)
How often it asks (frequency)
The rating scale
How employees answer
Reminders — email and Slack
Days and time zones — how the "monitoring day" works
Reading the report
Exporting results
Pausing, editing and deleting
Frequently asked questions

1. Turning Mood Monitoring on

Mood Monitoring is part of the Surveys module. It has to be switched on before the tab and the settings appear.

Go to Settings → Surveys → General.
Make sure Survey Module is enabled.
Turn on "Would you like to enable Mood Monitoring?" and save.

Once saved, a Mood Monitoring tab appears on the Surveys page — that is where you create and review monitorings. The same General settings screen also holds the two reminder settings (email and Slack), described in section 7.

2. Creating a monitoring — the four choices

Open Surveys → Mood Monitoring and click Add New Monitoring. A monitoring is defined by four things:

Name — an internal label only. It is shown to admins in the list and the report; employees never see it.
Audience — who is asked (section 3).
Frequency — how often the question appears (section 4).
Rating scale — the set of answers employees pick from (section 5).

A monitoring that already has responses can no longer be edited — this keeps its report consistent. You can still pause or delete it (section 11).

3. Who a monitoring reaches (audience)

There are two audience modes:

All employees — everyone in the company.
Custom — a specific group, built from any combination of offices and departments. (There is deliberately no "pick individual employees" option — singling people out by name would sit at odds with the anonymity the feature is built around.)

Important — a custom audience combines its lists with AND, not OR. If you fill in both an office and a department, an employee has to match both to be included — they must be in that office and in that department. This is the opposite of what most people expect (a union), so:

To reach "the Berlin office or the Design department", create two monitorings, one per list.
To reach "designers in the Berlin office", use one monitoring with both the office and the department filled in.

If you pick Custom, you must select at least one office or department — an empty custom audience is rejected.

4. How often it asks (frequency)

Three frequencies are available:

Daily — the question appears on each of the weekdays you pick (for example Monday, Wednesday, Friday).
Weekly — the question appears on a single weekday. Picking a different day replaces the current one.
Once — a one-off pulse that collects over a window, not on a single day. You set a start date and an "Open until" date; leave the end empty and the window defaults to one week. Employees can answer on any day inside that window.

Daily and Weekly monitorings need an end date. For an ongoing check-in, pick a date well ahead — you can pause a monitoring at any time, and once its end date has passed it moves to History on its own.

"Once" used to mean a single calendar day. It is now a window, so that people who are on leave, off shift, or simply do not open the app that day are not missed.

5. The rating scale

Each monitoring uses one of two scales, chosen when you create it:

1 – 3 — three faces (😞 🙂 🤩). Quick to answer, coarser reporting.
1 – 5 — five faces. More nuance in the averages and trends.

The colours run from red (low) to green (high) and mean the same thing everywhere — on the employee's answer widget, in the report calendar, and in the legend. They encode the scale, so they are not affected by your company's brand colour.

6. How employees answer

Employees do not open a survey. On a day a monitoring is scheduled for them, a small banner asking how they feel pops up at the bottom of every page they open in brainyHR, not only the dashboard, until they answer or choose "Not now". One tap on a face records the answer. It takes a few seconds, and the answer only ever feeds the aggregated report.

A few rules to know:

Once the answer is saved, the banner shows a short thank-you for a few seconds and then disappears. Each employee is counted once per day per monitoring — answering again on the same day does nothing.
An employee can choose "Not now" to dismiss the banner temporarily. For a recurring monitoring it comes back the next day; for a "Once" monitoring it comes back after about two hours (it has no "tomorrow").
"Not now" hides the banner only — it does not stop the email reminder. Someone who snoozed the banner but has not answered will still be emailed if email reminders are on.

7. Reminders — email and Slack

Reminders are two independent channels, both configured on Settings → Surveys → General next to the Mood Monitoring switch. Turning one off does not affect the other.

Email reminders

Switched off by default — turning Mood Monitoring on does not start emailing your team. You opt in deliberately.
When on: on each day a monitoring runs, every employee in its audience who has not yet answered gets one email at 09:00 in the company time zone.
With it off, the mood question is only shown in the in-app banner.

Slack notifications

A separate switch. When on, paste the webhook URL of the Slack channel you want posts in. The URL is kept even if you switch Slack off later, so pausing and resuming does not cost you the webhook.
Slack posts are one message per monitoring to the whole channel — an invitation to the team, not a private nudge to each person. Because it is a channel message, it cannot skip people who already answered; the per-person follow-up is what email is for.
If the switch is on but no webhook is connected, nothing is posted.

How often each channel fires

Recurring monitorings (Daily / Weekly) remind on every scheduled day, to everyone who has not answered.
Once monitorings remind twice: on the day the window opens, and on its final day. (If you create one after the morning run, it also gets a catch-up reminder the next day, so it is never missed.)

Employees without an email address are simply left out of the email step; they can still answer in the in-app banner.

8. Days and time zones — how the "monitoring day" works

This is the part that is impossible to guess from the screen, and the one that matters most if any of your offices are in a different time zone. Please read it before you draw conclusions from a report.

Every date in Mood Monitoring is your company's calendar day, in the company time zone. Not UTC, and not the employee's own device time. Concretely:

A vote is filed under the company day on which it was cast. Midnight company time is the boundary between one day's results and the next.
A monitoring is offered from its start date through its end date, inclusive, counted in company days.
The weekday of a Daily or Weekly monitoring is the company's weekday. For an office that is many hours ahead of or behind the company time zone, the local weekday can differ — a "Tuesday" monitoring is offered on the company's Tuesday, which may be an employee's Monday evening or Wednesday morning.
Reminders fire at 09:00 company time, on the company's scheduled day.

The day is decided at the company level, not per employee. A company with offices in several time zones therefore has a single shared "monitoring day". If you run reports for a distributed team, read the dates as company days — that is how the votes were bucketed.

9. Reading the report

The company overview

The top of the Mood Monitoring tab shows the whole company at a glance, so you do not have to open each monitoring to see how things are going. It has four figures — the company mood (a 0–100 index, with the change against the previous 30 days), participation, the number of responses, and how many monitorings are active — a mood trend chart, and a response distribution showing how the answers split between positive, neutral and negative (the spread a single average hides).

The mood trend can be viewed over three ranges, switched with the toggle above the chart:

Week — the last 7 days, one point per day.
Month — the last 30 days, one point per day.
Quarter — the last 12 weeks, one point per week.

The chart opens on the most useful range automatically: an established company lands on the Quarter overview, while one that has only been collecting for a few days opens on a daily view so its first points are visible instead of a single lonely dot.

The index puts every scale on the same 0–100 line, so a 1–3 and a 1–5 monitoring can be read together (0 = the lowest face, 100 = the highest). The same anonymity floor applies here too: each point — a day in the Week and Month views, a week in the Quarter view — is shown only if at least three different people answered in it, so a quiet day (or week) appears as a gap in the trend rather than a misleading dip. If a range has no point that clears the floor yet, the chart says so instead of drawing an empty grid. (The company-mood figure above uses the same rule over its 30-day window.)

There is also a participation by team view — the response rate for each office and department — so you can see which teams are engaging without seeing how anyone feels. It shows only whether people answered, never what they answered, and small teams are hidden so a row never points at an individual. Note that mood itself is never broken down by team: that would defeat the anonymity the whole feature depends on.

A single monitoring

Open a monitoring from the list (click its name, or the chart icon) to see its report. It shows:

A calendar where each day is tinted by that day's average mood, using the same red-to-green scale as the answer widget. A day with no votes is shown as empty — distinct from a day outside the monitoring's range.
The average for the shown period, and a participation rate (how many of the people asked actually answered).
Pick a day (or a month) to see the distribution of that slice — how the answers split across the scale — and a legend explaining the scale. The distribution is counts only; it never shows who chose what.

Answers are anonymous. The report never attributes a mood to a person — there is no way to see how an individual answered. To keep that true even for small groups, any slice answered by fewer than three people shows no result at all (its calendar day stays empty and its distribution is withheld) rather than a figure that could be traced back to one person. So a period with very few responses may show gaps — the participation rate keeps the rest in context.

10. Exporting results

The report can be exported to a spreadsheet. The export is an aggregate report, not a list of who voted what. Each row is a day (or period bucket) with its average score, the scale used (1–3 or 1–5), the corresponding mood label, the number of responses, the audience, and the participation. There are deliberately no employee names or individual answers — Mood Monitoring is designed to protect individual privacy, and the export follows the same rule as the on-screen report.

The scale is repeated on every row, so exports from two monitorings with different scales can be stacked in one sheet without the columns disagreeing.

11. Pausing, editing and deleting

Pause / Resume — stops and restarts a monitoring without losing its history.
Edit — allowed only until the monitoring has its first response, so an active report is never redefined underneath itself.
Delete — removes the monitoring and its data.
The list is split into Active (its end date is today or later — including monitorings that have not started yet and paused ones) and History (its end date has passed).

12. Frequently asked questions

Can I see how an individual answered?
No — by design. Every view and the export are aggregated, and no screen attributes a mood to a person. A slice answered by fewer than three people is hidden entirely, so a single answer can never be read back.

I enabled the feature but no emails went out. Why?
Email reminders are off by default. Turn on "Email reminders about Mood Monitoring" on Settings → Surveys → General. Until then, the question only appears in the in-app banner.

Nothing is posting to Slack.
Check that the Slack switch is on and a webhook URL is connected — both are needed. A switch on with no webhook posts nothing.

Why did an employee get the reminder even though they clicked "Not now"?
"Not now" hides the in-app banner; it does not opt them out of the email. The email stops once they actually answer.

My office is in a different time zone and the days look shifted.
Days are the company's calendar days in the company time zone (section 8). For offices far from that zone, the local weekday can differ. Read report dates as company days.

What does "Once" mean — one day?
No — a collection window. Employees can answer on any day from the start date up to the "Open until" date; leave it empty and the window is one week.

Can I change a monitoring after it starts collecting?
Not once it has responses. Pause it and create a new one if the setup needs to change.