Company led by Google veterans uses AI to ‘nudge’ workers toward happiness

[能田]

                                                   (World Today Saturday 5 January 2019)

                      Company led by Google veterans uses AI

                        to ‘nudge’ workers toward happiness

The startup Humu applies data-driven lessons in human resources to the goal of improving employee

satisfaction.Published05 January, 2019.  THE NEW YORK TIMES

Updated 05 January, 2019

MOUNTAIN VIEW (United States) — Technology companies like to promote artificial intelligence’s (AI) potential for solving some of the world’s toughest problems, like reducing automobile deaths and helping doctors diagnose diseases. A company started by three former Google employees is pitching AI as the answer to a more common problem: being happier at work.

The startup, Humu, is based in Google’s hometown, and it builds on some of the people-analytics programs pioneered by the internet giant, which has studied things like the traits that define great managers and how to foster better teamwork.

Humu wants to bring similar data-driven insights to other companies. It digs through employee surveys using artificial intelligence to identify one or two behavioral changes that are likely to make the biggest impact on elevating a workforce’s happiness. Then it uses emails and text messages to “nudge” individual employees into small actions that advance the larger goal.

At a company where workers feel that the way decisions are made is opaque, Humu might nudge a manager before a meeting to ask the members of her team for input and to be prepared to change her mind. Humu might ask a different employee to come up with questions involving her team that she would like to have answered.

At the heart of Humu’s efforts is the company’s “nudge engine” (yes, it’s trademarked). It is based on economist Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize-winning research into how people often make decisions because of what is easier rather than what is in their best interest, and how a well-timed nudge can prompt them to make better choices.

Google has used this approach to coax employees into the corporate equivalent of eating their vegetables, prodding them to save more for retirement, waste less food at the cafeteria and opt for healthier snacks.

Using machine learning, Humu will tailor the timing, content and techniques of the messages it delivers based on how employees respond.

“Often we want to be better people,” said Mr Laszlo Bock, Humu’s chief executive and Google’s former leader of what the company calls people operations, or human resources. “We want to be the person we hope we can be. But we need to be reminded. A nudge can have a powerful impact if correctly deployed on how people behave and on human performance.”

In Mr Bock’s decade-plus tenure at Google, the company’s workforce grew more than eightfold. Google struggled at times with how to manage its rapid expansion, and some employees accused the company of creating a workplace that was hostile to women.

In November, 20,000 employees — prompted by an article in The New York Times that detailed how Google had paid millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of misconduct — walked off the job to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment.

The episode underscored Google’s unique and seemingly incongruous internal culture. Employees feel empowered to agitate for change, and the company takes innovative approaches to managing its workforce. But deep-rooted problems fester as they would anywhere else.

While Mr Bock was at Google, he led many of its human-resources analytics efforts and became well known in the field, writing a 2015 book that laid out the company’s data-driven approach to personnel management.

He started Humu in 2017 shortly after leaving Google with two former colleagues: Ms Jessie Wisdom, who has a doctorate in behavioral decision research and worked with Bock in people analytics, and Mr Wayne Crosby, a former director of engineering at Google. Humu has raised $40 million and has 15 customers, companies that range in size from 150 to 65,000 employees.

One major challenge for the company is handling data and artificial intelligence in the sensitive area of human resources. Humu said its software was built with employee privacy in mind, allowing workers to delete personal data, including anonymous comments made in company surveys. Humu said it complied with Europe’s stringent data privacy rules.

But will workers consider the nudges useful or manipulative?

Mr Todd Haugh, an assistant professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, said nudges could push workers into behaving in ways that benefited their employers’ interests over their own.

“The companies are the only ones who know what the purpose of the nudge is,” Mr Haugh said. “The individual who is designing the nudge is the one whose interests are going to be put in the forefront.”

Mr Sanjiv Razdan, the chief operating officer at Sweetgreen, a salad chain and one of Humu’s customers, said that if nudges did not have a track record at Google, he would probably consider the concept a bunch of “hocus-pocus happiness nonsense.”

But after receiving nudges for a few months himself in emails from Crosby, whose email address is used to send the messages, Mr Razdan said the bite-size reminders made it easy to take action right away. In one instance, he said, he was prompted to ask members of his team for their opinions on decisions he was facing.

“The team doesn’t know I was nudged,” he said. “But I’m not ashamed to tell everyone that I heard from Wayne today.” THE NEW YORK TIMES