Employees love transparency, care more about co-workers than managers and don’t exactly know what their company’s mission is.

These are some of the findings from TINYpulse’s robust new study that provides an interesting look into employee happiness — or lack thereof.

It’s been one year since TINYpulse, which helps leaders get a pulse on how their employees are feeling, was founded. In that time, loads of data has come through via weekly surveys that ask customers to rate how they’re feeling in the workplace.

The Seattle start-up analysed those numbers and have unveiled the study, titled “7 Vital Trends Disrupting Today’s Workplace.” The company analysed over 40,000 anonymous survey responses from over 300 organisations between September 1, 2012 and November 15, 2013.

Among the most interesting findings are those relating to what makes employees happy. Management transparency was the most important factor there, with a 0.94 correlation coefficient with employee happiness.

Also, happiness level seems to depend more on colleagues than bosses. Correlation between happiness and rating of co-workers was 23 percent higher than between happiness and rating of a direct supervisor.

“This shows that who you work with is becoming more important than who you work for,” TINYpulse founder David Niu said in a press release. “We often think of employee happiness and satisfaction as being manager-driven, but now as the workplace becomes more cross-matrixed, collaborative, and ‘bottom-up,’ the importance of co-worker relationships continues to grow.”

Another data point: Only 42 percent of employees know their organisation’s vision, mission and value — an “alarmingly low number”, TINYpulse said.

Niu, who previously founded NetConversions and BuddyTV, started TINYpulse last year after going on a “careercation” with this family around the world.

TINYpulse provides a weekly survey to over 300 companies around the world. After analysing over 40,000 anonymous responses, we uncovered important workforce trends that we haven’t seen in the popular press.

The data reveals vital learnings about how employees feel about their organisations’ culture, management, recognition, and their fellow co-workers. Since our mission is to “make employees happier,” we wanted to share the results and data so that organisations can engage their employees, and it doing so, they will improve their bottom line. In addition to the data, we have provided company case studies, video and social media insights to show the stories behind the trends.

Other findings were:

— 82 percent of respondents claimed that their manager clearly outlined their role and responsibility. At the day-to-day team level it seems that managers are able to effectively set expectations and accountability.

— Team play and collaboration are the top trait employees love about their co-workers. In the recruitment and interview process, leading companies must incorporate opportunities to test and screen for these vital characteristics in candidates.

— 18 percent of responses included a suggestion, and organisations that don’t promote employee suggestions are at an innovation disadvantage. Businesses that don’t crowdsource innovation and suggestions from their employees are missing a huge opportunity. If you’re relying on an open-door policy, then you’re not fully leveraging your most prized asset — your people.

— 36 percent of responses provided peer-to-peer recognition which proves that a lightweight and regular system boosts intra-organisation recognition. As organisations become more decentralised, virtual, and matrixed, there’s a growing need to provide regular recognition that goes beyond the antiquated one-on-one supervisor-to-employee relationship.