If you’re happy and you know it.....

So what did you get up to this weekend? If you went to a concert and go every now and again, you may feel better about life. A study from researchers at Victoria’s Deakin University surveyed 1,000 Australians and found that those who attended any sort of communal musical experience, be that a festival or just a night out dancing reported higher levels of satisfaction with their lives.

This is probably no surprise. Most cultures have a tradition of people meeting up and belting out a few tunes, from the Cheile House in Ireland, to Jamming Sessions in more modern times, to singing at Sunday Service, to rhythmic rituals in ancient or indigenous cultures. Shared communal musical experiences have always been with us and according to Deakin University for good reason - our emotional well-being.

However, in recent times, musical experience has become much more personalized. We have our own playlists on Spotify, shuffle our MP3 collections or stream our favorite artists on YouTube. There is less of a shared musical experience and more of a niche  individual one. That is not all bad, it reflects our choice and preferences.

Many organisations which look at staff well-being have devised appreciation days, team building events and other initiatives to motivate and create a buzz. There has been a move away from the once common company or department night out.

You are now more likely to lift a work colleague over a wall on a team building day than you are to show them a near perfect Moon Walk routine on the dance floor. According to the people at Deakin University, we may need to swing the pendulum back a little and have a few more nights out, be that to concerts or just a night on the tiles, and do so regularly.

If for all kinds of logistical reasons, company nights out are hard to organise, create a scheme where your department regularly has subsidized concert tickets or allow staff to leave early / come in late to make attending events feasible. This could work both ways, staff get a perk and organisations get a workforce that is more satisfied with life.

As artists find it harder to get revenues from singles or album sales (because of the aforementioned Spotify), more and more are now touring. There has never been a better time for live music. Encourage people to leave the playlists at home, pack their dancing shoes or air guitar and enjoy their music.

Figuring out Feelings

Understanding well-being and how we feel is very much in our consciousness. Organisations now see staff well-being and personal happiness as key components of a sustainable way of working and a big influence on staff retention. At a societal level we are concerned about how stressed and unhappy our youth are, how lonely our elderly might be and the increasing suicide rates in many developed countries. If we had a way of measuring and trending how people feel, that may go a long way in designing early intervention programs and reviewing the efficacy of the various initiatives deployed by organisations and society itself.     

I read something which got me thinking a little more about this. Researchers at the University of Manchester and Indiana University have put some science behind this idea of  ‘sentiment tracking’.

They looked at how global emotion and mood, as measured via something like Twitter, could predict stock market activity. They investigated whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large scale Twitter feeds, correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time. They analyzed the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS)

Their results indicated that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions. If you want to predict closing prices on the Dow Jones, have an eye on the Twitter feed.

This raises some interesting questions about how we look at social media data or activity. It may justify a more qualitative approach. When it comes to social media marketing, we may need to look at how our followers feel, rather than just counting them.

While causation and correlation could be difficult to nail down, there is perhaps something in this for the Data Scientists among us. There is a plethora of online content generated by users across all forms of social media, text, images, video. 

Parsing online content and cross referencing this with behavior may create some predictive tools or highlight some change in public mood. Looking at which emoticons are used and how frequently may be one place to start. Too many ASAPs in emails might signal someone under a little stress, lots of work emails sent at night or weekends could be from someone on the road to burnout. 

The take away is that with a focus on the Internet of Things, we could be relying on devices to tell us more about the world and how we live our lives. However a lot of this information could already be out there, we just have to look for it.  

Ever been interviewed by a bus driver?

When preparing for an interview, many people focus on having prepared answers for how they deal with challenges, how they maximise their experience and how they articulate what they can bring to the new organisation.

These are all important things. Equally, employers have interview questions prepared to get these answers and perhaps also have a few psychometric tests in reserve to identify the most suitable candidate.

Having done a good few interviews over the years and seen this in action, I was impressed by an article in the Wall St Journal which took a simpler and perhaps a more insightful view on screening candidates.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh explained how they use the shuttle bus driver as a key part of the recruitment process. Many of their candidates come from out of town and they send the company shuttle bus to collect them at the airport. There is usually a full day of interviews before they are dropped back to the airport. Before any decision is made on hiring, the recruiter gets a report from the shuttle bus driver. Regardless of the formal interviews, if the bus driver wasn’t well treated, the candidate does not get the job.

What Zappos are doing here is gauging how well people interact with others in a real world setting, not some lab based personality test. The same idea could be applied by asking the receptionist how a person behaved when waiting to be called in or asking an administrator how the person acted when finalising the interview times, contact numbers etc.

As an employer this can compliment the more formal aspects of the recruitment process and perhaps cut through some of the prepared answers to get a real insight into the candidates social skills. As a candidate, be aware that you are always under scrutiny, even if it is the receptionist or bus driver asking the questions.

A Blog a view when recruiting?

I recently came across an article on the BPS Research Digest about linking bloggers words and their personalities. It looked at a study by Tal Yarkoni who analysed the content of 694 blogs, containing an average of 115,000 words written over an average period of about two years. It then matched this with the authors’ answers to on-line personality questionnaires.

The trawl of data by Tal Yarkoni allowed him to zoom in on how certain words were used. Some strong correlations included Neuroticism with use of 'irony', Extroversion with 'drinks' and Openness correlated with 'ink'. While the specific correlations may or may not be important, the interesting point here is that blogs and other parts of the internet now allow new ways of examining and studying our personality types. Contrary to the idea that we use some idealised or false alter ego when on-line, our use of words and other on-line behaviours may in fact betray our real personality.

This got me thinking. In many different industries today, roles involve some customer or market facing activity. Increasingly our Facebook, Twitter or some other social media presence are part of our professional identity. I began to wonder if we should ask  some job applicants to write a blog or maintain a Twitter feed for a few weeks as part of the recruitment process? The subject matter may or may not be related to a specific job.  Rather than focus on just the content, it would be an opportunity to see how engaging, relevant and professional the candidate can be in their on-line presence. You could throw the proverbial cat among the pigeons and introduce a few trolls or incendiary comments and see how they are handled.The level of effort put in may also show how badly the candidate wants the job. The end result would inevitably be subjective but would give another understanding of the candidate, outside the comfort zone of the rehearsed interview and sanitised CV.

On the flip side, if you are hunting down the ideal job in a company you would like to work for, a blog or Twitter feed about the market or technology used in that ideal job could be a way of showing how competent you are, how badly who want it and the type of new thinking you could bring to an organisation. This is especially the case for many new jobs that previously didn't exist and don't have a defined qualification profile e.g. Social Media Marketeer, Data Scientist, SaaS Analyst. There is no one degree to qualify you for these types of jobs, you need to qualify yourself and get that across to employers. 

The take way here is that a blog is another window into who we are as people, how we behave and beyond that a source of information about how motivated, competent and suitable we may be for some jobs. This can work if you are hiring or want to be hired.

Go easy on the new guy

When you induct new employees or make a change to how current employees work, do you consider how safe or stressed they feel? Starting a new job can be a stressful enough time. We can feel under pressure to live up to our interview or CV, we might be anxious to impress a new boss or just fit in. The level of stress we feel in those type of situations could be important. There is some research from the academic world suggesting that stress and safety concerns impact negatively on students ability to learn while in school.

The same could be true in the work place. The idea is that stress makes it harder to learn, by reducing working memory and self-control. This could be particularly important in areas like induction into software development where new hires may only be hired because the current staff are very busy or there is a pre-existing product problem. Chances are their first project could be a busy one with tight deadlines.

As a software developer they may also need to learn new coding procedures, maybe a new language or use of some customised in-house development tools. This cocktail of new systems and pressure may result in induction not going as smoothly as envisaged. Productivity, quality and compliance could all take a dip and there may be a few more mistakes than expected.

The take away from this is that if you work in an area where learning new systems is a big part of induction, try to avoid dropping the new guy in the deep-end straight away. You might end up with a better trained, more productive and happier inductee. 

Hope Springs Creativity

Do you hope that the weather will be fine for the weekend, that your favorite team will do well, that the government will treat you fairly in the budget? If you do and are generally the hopeful type you may also be pretty creative. 

A post by Professor Drew Boyd from the University of Cincinnati examines the research in this area and comes to the conclusion that hope predicts creativity. Professor Boyd looks at a 2009 study by Armenio Rego  which examines how employees' sense of hope explains their creative output at work. The study asked one hundred and twenty five employees to rate their personal sense of hope and happiness while their supervisors rated the employees' creativity. Based on the correlations, hope foretells creativity.

Boyd discusses how different types of hope are seen as important. Hope “requires some level of internal, sustaining force that pushes individuals to persevere in the face of challenges inherent to creative work."

So if you are hiring people for a creative role, discuss the level of hope candidates have when doing the interview. If you are hiring from a pool of current employees, look at the people you would rate as creative and then check their sense of personal hope. The correlation found by Armenio Rego may validate your initial opinion on peoples creativity. 

I hope you found this interesting.

Funny Works

There are many studies which espouse the value of humour in the work place. An often quoted study by Professor William Hampes looked at the relationship between humour and trust. Those who scored high on a test that measured sense of humour for social purposes were considered more trustworthy.

Other studies suggest that humour is good for group cohesiveness and leads to richer, more efficient communication. One such study by Jessica Mesmer-Magnus, David J. Glew, Chockalingam Viswesvaran looked at how humour is associated with employee health (e.g. burnout, health), work-related outcomes (e.g. performance, job satisfaction, withdrawal), perceived supervisor/leader effectiveness and how it can counteract workplace stress.

They found that employee humour is associated with enhanced work performance, satisfaction, workgroup cohesion, health, and coping effectiveness, as well as decreased burnout, stress, and work withdrawal. That is no joke. Supervisor use of humour was associated with enhanced subordinate work performance, satisfaction, perception of supervisor performance, satisfaction with supervisor, and workgroup cohesion, as well as reduced work withdrawal.

As is the case with many studies in this area there is the challenge of defining what is funny (some people just don’t get it). We also need to be careful not to cross any lines with sexist or some other non-appropriate humour among work colleagues.

That aside, given the positive associations with being able to make a few wise cracks, perhaps humour should be a skill we look for when building teams or hiring a supervisor. Worst case scenario, they will be a good laugh on company nights out or a bit of light entertainment on a dreary Monday morning.

To get started try this out ‘I said to the librarian I hope you don't have a book on reverse psychology ‘. Funny?, well you had to be there. Btw, free humour tip: If you find yourself Saying "You had to be there" chances are you need to work on your funny game a bit more.

Plead Guilty Everytime

If you are looking to hire a leader, a hard worker who will be looked up to, what personal traits would you short list?

How high up that short list would 'Guilt' be? Probably not very. However some research conducted in 2011 by Francis J. Flynn at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business has put forward the idea that Guilt should be near the top of the list.

In the Harvard Business Review, Flynn describes how he gave 150 workers in the Finance Dept. of a Fortune 500 Company a standard psychological test. The test (TOSCA - Test of Self-Conscious Affect) measured the workers tendency to feel guilt. The results were then compared with actual performance reviews. The results were clear, the more an employee was prone to guilt, the higher the rating they got from their boss in reviews.

Flynn found this very interesting as the TOSCA and the performance ratings were completely independent but the link between performance and guilt was well established. Flynn and his colleagues conducted some follow up research which showed that the guilt prone were also more committed to their organizations and were seen as stronger leaders by their peers.

The research also suggested that guilt-ridden people were more likely to accept layoffs and carry them out. Flynn explained that it was not that they don’t feel guilty about laying people off, "it’s that they feel obligated to support their employer, so they accept layoffs as a way to reduce costs".

So next time you are hiring someone whom you want to be a hard worker, be leadership material, can be counted on to be fully committed to the organisation and if necessary conduct the unattractive business of redundancies, select the guilty.

You could give a TOSCA test, or have a chat about their previous experience, or have candidates involved in some role play scenario, where they will have to confront a potentially guilt laden situation and comment on how guilty they feel.

You probably know your own staff pretty well, especially if you work in a small or medium size company. Think of the people you know that would be the type to feel guilty. Are they also committed and hard-working, are they people the company can count on? If so then perhaps add 'Guilt' to the attributes for your next hires.

Just to note: The article in the Harvard Business Review was well contested and the comments section has several points taking issue with the research.

How Risky are Your People?

We have seen with the global melt down how excessive risk taking led to individuals, portfolios, organisations and entire economies being over exposed to risks that have turned sour. Many of the European banks regularly under go 'stress tests' to bottom out the resulting losses  and it is going to be a long road back to solvency for many.

This over exposure to risk can also happen within a business and need not be limited to financial investments. It could manifest itself in putting large resources into certain projects, agreeing stage payments or credit terms with large clients, targeting certain markets or taking on certain competitors.

Pretty much every area of your business takes positions both internally and externally where they absorb some risk. It is worth asking, how well have any of these decision makers been considered for their propensity to take acceptbale levels of risk. In the 'real politik' of stability and contractual arrangements, you would not remove these managers if you realised that they were excessive risk takers, but you may put additional checks and balances in place to oversee the risk aspect of their decisions.

This then begs the question, how could you identify managers that may be poor at recognising and exposing themselves to risk. The answer is simple, you assess for risk. You could use a variety of risk rating tools, perhaps some role play scenarios or some observational based study. None of these on their own would be definitive as biological factors, over confidence bias, payment structures, organisational culture would all feed into risk taking behaviour. For example some studies have found that testosterone is positively associated with risk taking.

Such assessments would however give you a benchmark or indication of the risk takers in your business, relative to their peers. One such tool is the Iowa Gambling Task, introduced by Antoine Bechara, António Damásio, Daniel Tranel and Steven Anderson. It is designed to assess risk preferences by simulating real-life decision making using uncertainty, rewards, and penalties.

Initially, it was used to compare individuals with prefrontal lesions with healthy individuals. Participants play a game where they are given four decks of cards and an amount of money (e.g., €1000). They are then instructed to select cards one at a time and try to lose the least amount of money and win the most.

Some decks are "bad decks" and others are  "good decks", because some will lead to losses over the long run, and others will lead to gains. For example, turning a card can give a (relatively large) reward (€100 in decks A and B and €50 in decks C and D) or a penalty (large in decks A and B and small in decks C and D).

Playing from decks A and B leads to an overall loss, while playing C and D leads to an overall gain.  After encountering a few losses, normal participants begin to avoid the bad decks with large losses. They recognise that the occasional large gain (of €100 in deck A) will more than likely be wiped out by a large loss from the same deck.

You could tweak this concept to make it more relevant to the type of decisions your managers make and if you have the data available it may be interesting to see if their previous risk history correlated with their score.

You could measure how quickly managers recognised and moved away from the 'bad deck' with its large but long term unsustainable rewards. You could tweak the rules to apparently encourage short term risk taking (by offering bonuses for reaching a win target quickly) but also state long term viability cannot be compromised. This would then allow you to see which managers are primarily focused on short term and fail to take sufficient notice of long term implications.

When designing a job specification, if a key requirement was the ability to read risk, to appreciate long term goals rather than large unsustainable quick wins, then perhaps this type of test could form part of the recruitment process.

If a role involved minimal supervision and significant autonomy, then it may inform decisions you make on introducing additional oversight or exposure measurement. For the European banks, it’s too late for any of this.

There are several free and open source assessments similar to Iowa Gambling Task available. A version of the Iowa Gambling task is available as part of the PEBL Project .There is a customisable version that works with Google Spreadsheets or your own spreadsheet. There is also a version for android smart phones and tablets. As with any tool, you need to ensure you are fully licensed, based on your own circumstances before use.

Tolerance or Intolerance for Ambiguity

If you were looking to fill a position where requirements or specifications were vague, where definition of tasks or targets could not be clearly defined, how would go about it?

This is the type of scenario that exists in many small or medium size businesses, where roles and tasks are fluid, not set in stone and maybe not very well defined. Some people work better in this type of environment. There are those who grow with and take advantage of the flexibility in a situation like this.

I have seen this at first hand in start up software companies where developers get to do business analysis, coding, testing,support,  marketing and project planning, and that is all before lunch on any given day. This gives the employee the chance to try out a number of disciplines, see which one matches their skill set best and which one they may like to go on and specialise in. They thrive on the variety and freedom which ambiguity provides.

I have seen others that get frustrated by the ever changing requirements, so many loose ends make progress hard to measure and its impossible to get anything finished as you constantly have to swap and change between tasks and roles. It is not even clear what you are expected to get done everyday. Some people prefer certainty of task and targets and may work better in a more corporate environment where your day is well mapped out, what you are expected to do is well defined and establishing or reaching your targets is unambiguous.

In order to discern which recruitment candidate best suits either role, it may be possible to use an Intolerance of Ambiguity test (sample). This type of test may give an indication of the inability to accept (without discomfort) situations that allow an alternative point of view(s) or that are vague.

If a candidate scored high on Intolerance, then maybe the vague, changeable role is not for them. If you wanted someone to implement policy in a black and white way, maybe the Intolerance would be an advantage. Think Judge Dredd here.  If you wanted someone to work with minimal direction (think Mac Gyver here) then Intolerance maybe a disadvantage as that person may struggle to quickly decide what to do next in a series of tasks where there are many choices.

If you think this post is rambling and flipping from one point to another, without being really clear then maybe you already have an idea of how tolerant you are of ambiguity. Does that suit your job?

Using Cognitive Load

It is well documented in a number of studies that there is a correlation between cognitive load and committing errors or performing complex tasks inefficiently. This has a number of implications for the work place.

Firstly at the point of recruitment could we have a standard cognitive load test (The Sternberg Memory Task, tapping task, or the NASA TLX) to measure cognitive load of candidates This would be particularly important for recruits that may have to deal with a crisis involving complex information and decisions. For these type of positions you could weigh the candidates cognitive load as factor in the hiring decision, the higher the load capability, perhaps the more resilient they are to making errors. It is more complicated than that but you get the picture.

You could take it a step further and grade a vacant position as likely to involve tasks where cognitive load, as well as empathy, time management, risk taking etc are important requirements. This is a whole separate area but is a bug bear of mine. In many job adverts (particularly in the technical world) we rate the skills required as knowledge of systems, languages, standards, interfaces etc,  when these skills are what is required to do the job, but not to be most effective candidate (eg knowledge of a system is not much use if you are prone to panic or denial in a crisis). That train of thought is a diversion and is a discussion for another day.

Back on point. Secondly, if you have a new recruit and they are doing work which you know will be cognitively demanding and may be prone to error, you may need to provide them with a work environment where they are not asked to multitask or where error checking can mitigate against the increased risk of errors. Again, you could rate jobs or tasks as requiring multitasking, likelihood of cognitive load being reached and then provide appropriate test and quality control support.

Thirdly,  you could use the correlation between cognitive load and errors as a basis for testing the usability of systems or software. For example,  The Tapping Task developed by Mike Albers has been used to test websites . The idea is that a person navigates through a website while performing a task like tapping or drumming, as the person gets into more complex areas of the website navigation and needs to think more, the tapping slows or stalls. This could be used to rate the usability of a website payment system, product search etc. This same rationale could also be applied to processes other than websites such as operating a till or reading spreadsheets.

This type of testing is used in aviation and other mission critical situations. Given the relatively inexpensive nature of the testing involved, the relatively benign ethical consequences and straightforward interpretation of results, it may be a type of test most organisations could consider.

All this is pretty mainstream in that the cognitive load/error link is a factor behind the banning of mobile phones while driving and there are many other applications to the work place and occupational health and safety (e.g. is it wise to ask your sales person very complex questions while driving as they make give a wrong answer or crash or both). Again these are thoughts and discussions for another day. Hopefully my cognitive load was not too stretched in wiring this, if so, blame the typos on that :-)

Uncover Hidden Bias and Attitudes

Implicit Association Test - Screen for bias or attitudes?

We are all a little or more than a little biased. Don’t feel bad about this. The ability to quickly tell a friend from foe helped early humans survive, being able to quickly catergorise people is a good thing in that respect. The downside is that this is also the foundation of stereotypes, prejudice and, ultimately, discrimination.It can affect how we treat and work with people.

We can be consciously committed to social equality, and deliberately work to behave without prejudgment, yet still possess hidden negative biases or stereotypes. What relevance has this to the workplace? If you have a company that has customers from a particular group, for example, elderly or mainly female, then these groups could be treated differently by staff members carrying this latent but present prejudice to that social group

Why it’s important

Many studies show a link between hidden biases and actual behavior. Hidden biases reveal themselves in how we interact with the world at large and the work place is no exception.
Studies have shown that school teachers inadvertently or otherwise show prejudices in the classroom. Some researchers believe children of color and white children in the same classroom effectively receive different educations. The same could be true in internal meetings, customer service or when forming project teams.

A now classic experiment showed that white interviewers sat farther away from black applicants than from white applicants, made more speech errors and ended the interviews 25% sooner. Such discrimination has been shown to diminish the performance of anyone treated that way, whether black or white.

"Implicit Association Tests" (IATs) can shine a light on these hidden, or automatic, stereotypes. They go way beyond race and gender, indeed Project Implicit — a collaborative research effort between researchers at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and University of Washington shows many examples of tests for different associations and biases.

How it works

The implicit association test is often associated with Greenwald (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998), and is used to measure personality or prejudices while ensuring that participants are oblivious to the purpose of this procedure.

Say you are testing for diligence. You would ask a person to hit a key on a keyboard when a word comes up that relates to them e.g, their gender, age, star sign etc and the same key when a word relating to diligence comes up e.g. meticulous. You would also ask them to hit a different key when a word comes up that is not about them and when a word that does not relate to diligence comes up e.g. lazy. Diligent people complete this task quickly with few errors

You could swap the keys and have the same key relating to the self and negative behaviour. People who are not very diligent would perform well on this test. The difference between the two tests would rate the persons level of diligence (Steffens, 2004).

How you can use it  You could use this to build a test for diligence as part of induction training or recruitment. You could also create a test to investigate attitudes to, for example, older people if you ran a residential care facility, attitudes to race if your employees or customers would belong to that particular group. These tests are more difficult to counter and may be more reliable than asking new recruits to say what their thoughts on old people, racial groups are.

You could rate peoples attitude to particular project (have a key to press for project terms and positive thoughts, a key for non-project terms and negative thoughts, then swap). This could be ran over the life span of a project to get some ones attitude to the project, feelings it will succeed or fail. Getting back to diligence, you could periodically test staff to see if scores are dipping and intervene with work place changes or motivational improvements.

If your company was bought out, before and after the buy out have a test with a key to press for company terms and positive words, a key to press for non company terms and negative words, then swap. You would get an indication of workers change in attitude to their new conditions and owners. Get the picture?

It could be cross validated with some other tests, performance results, interview questions or observations of performance but is a good starting point.

This is a Test Post