Work Needs More Personality

I have a hypothesis (I know and I'm sorry) that we are at the start of the personalisation of the consumption of work, much in the same way that we’ve personalised consumer experience over the past 10 years or so. We don’t all get the same suggestions from Netflix to personalise our useless consumption of shows (read: why my daughter is forbidden from using my profile) so why don’t we get recommendations about how each of us works best to personalise work? 

One reason is that we’ve been locked in this Industrial Revolution age notion that we need to manage inputs (i.e., time) to generate outputs. Oh, and workers can’t be trusted. And they’ll work more for more money. The list of legacy notions goes on. But what if what’s been missing is how we make work more personal? And currently because of COVID many of us have been engaged in one of humanity's largest natural experiments. I believe the future of work needs to better incorporate the personal attributes that help each of us have greater agency over our own wellbeing like our cognitive fingerprints, energy levels / chronotypes and others. And then EX solutions empowered by emotionally intelligent AI will be able to help us execute this agency real-time by better matching our strengths to the work to be done to optimise our engagement and sense of purpose. 

However, the likelihood is we’re probably a bit aways from this seemingly Minority Report-esque quantified self at work due to reasons I expound on below. So, how do we go about making work incrementally more personal whilst these questions are sorted?

One way to immediately personalise work is the use of psychometrics.

There are a number of popular tools in use in companies today which don't have predictive value (e.g., MBTI, anything with a colour in it, horoscopes 😉) when it comes to behaviour, preference & performance. This is not to say they therefore don't have utility for helping start a conversation and encourage behaviours. However, a key question that needs to be asked when leveraging psychometrics is whether you intend to use them as conversational and cultural behavioural enablers or to engage in more predictive design focused activities where these tools aren't quite as useful. 

Psychometrics can measure a host of underlying indicators from personality to risk preference to burnout and more and can help us design more personal work - accordingly with personality as a starting point. Personality as a measure is slower moving (although your personality does change over your lifetime), and it has good test-retest reliability. It has demonstrated effects from resilience / burnout to virtual work (the subject of my own future of work research at PwC) to ethical behaviour and findings have largely continued to replicate.

Psychometric scales also go through a robust process of development in the scientific community and are subjected to rigorous peer and community review. While the scientific process isn’t perfect and there have been replication issues, my view is that we are likely to get a fairly reliable result from an open source pursuit of knowledge. And now a cadre of scientists have essentially rebadged themselves as auditors working to replicate strains of research (in addition to system level fixes like preregistration of experiments, open science initiatives, etc.) so the replication fix is well underway.

So why aren't companies using psychometrics more in future of work design?

One key issue with the adoption of psychometrics at work is scale fluency. The reality is not everyone is trained on what goes into developing psychometrics as it's a fairly specialised skill. And in-house behavioural scientist units who have these atypical corporate capabilities to be tuned into and help assess the various psychometric scales out there also tend to be consumer focused. This makes sense as 75% of the behavioural science units have been created since 2014. Non-policy behavioural science groups are a relatively new corporate phenomenon – think data science centres of excellence a couple of years ago – and so it makes sense to point these groups at consumers which is where the money is at the moment.

The table below is a behavioural science survey of how these in-house groups spend their focus. It’s worth noting that the one employee focused item on changing employee behaviour activity below typically relates to managing employee misselling and other consumer-related behavioural risks.

Source: Behavioural Teams Report

I expect that this focus will shift though as companies increasingly see work experience design as a competitive advantage (basically a key way tech has competing against other industries for some time). And psychometrics can help play a big part in ensuring that we begin to take a look at work design in a persona-driven model that goes beyond just looking at these as a function of location (a goal I’ve personally never woken up with in the morning) but rather experience and objectives for the day (which I suspect most of us do). But perhaps the biggest remaining issue is privacy which I touch on below.

Once we've given work more personality, then what?

Once we’ve begun to design work that is more personal using psychometrics then we can begin to explore the use of personalized real-time nudges to help employees achieve their goals. To that end, I’m not personally a big fan of the word nudge as it kind of has this “other” directed feel to it as opposed to something that empowers individual autonomy. However, as bullish as I am on the quantified self at work and personally want this yesterday, I’m aware that the potential for undue harm is too great to roll this out in a haphazard manner. 

Before employees feel comfortable with this exchange, organisations need to start to become more transparent with the data they track about employees and the steps they take to protect employee anonymity. I do personally think knowing how we are monitored and what companies do with this data should be standard industry practice in the future. The use of worker data needs to be thoughtful and transparent – ethical use of employee data needs to be considered alongside ethical AI, committees need to be set up, companies need to draft an employee bill of rights, independent associations need time to give this topic a voice, etc. However, while we are building this future, psychometrics can help us give work a bit more personality.