Being unhappy at work is such a cliché, and unfortunately for companies it also looks like an expensive one. Research on worker happiness has linked it to 12 percent more productivity, and businesses with happy employees beat their peers by 3.8 percent in the stock market. A Gallup report tallies up the cost of unhappy, disengaged employees to the U.S. economy at $350 billion annually due to lost productivity.

More and more companies have tried to combat employee doldrums with perks, such as the famous Google fresh juice bar or Airbnb's annual $2,000 handout for employees to travel the world. Then there's Zappos' weed-them-out approach (recently copied by Amazon): give employees a cash incentive to leave just in case they're not happy, and rush them out of the building before they get trained and become a disgruntle employee. But do any of these maneuvers work? How can companies know how their employees are doing?

One startup is looking to help companies fight employee unhappiness with better data. TINYpulse uses anonymity and simplicity to zero in on company problems: Weekly, a one-question survey is sent out to assess how workers feel about anything from compensation to the condition of the bathrooms.