Q: What is the goal of Humu? What are you building?
Jessie: We’re building a technology that makes it easy for organizations to turn whatever strategy they’re working on into actual action in a smart, scalable way by delivering personalized guidance to employees. This could be a leadership framework or a cultural values framework they want to enact. Or this could be a way to respond to an engagement survey or a mechanism to give teams more psychological safety. We think organizations have an opportunity to use technology to foster incremental but impactful changes.
Q: How does this work in practice?
Jessie: We take in a bunch of data and assess what’s going on — not just at the organizational level, but much more granularly within teams. Humu takes a mix of different inputs, including company strategy or initiatives, personal preferences, what we know your team might need to work on, and uses it to send out personalized guidance.
We have a team of behavioral economists, psychologists, and data scientists who look for the latest information and research that might be applicable to the customer’s business.
We have a team of behavioral economists, psychologists, and data scientists who look for the latest information and research that might be applicable to the customer’s business. We do first-hand research with teams to understand jobs, how workers think and interact, and how the organization interacts with them. We want to understand what affects those people’s experiences. What level of autonomy do they have? Do they work with customers, or not? Do they have one-on-one meetings with their managers? Are those meetings meaningful? Does the employee have growth conversations with their manager?
To give you an example — we might want to know how much autonomy people have in their jobs. In retail, schedule autonomy is obviously something that’s a big issue. It affects performance, retention, and happiness. Or take autonomy in how they’re able to respond to customer complaints as another example. Employees often want to do the right thing but can feel constrained by company policy or lack of autonomy in their roles.
With that information, we build nudges that address their situation and help them work on whatever behaviors are relevant in that situation.
Q: How do you research the nudges?
Jessie: We start by reviewing the existing research base on a topic, and often also do extensive user research with the customer’s employees. We might say, “Imagine you got this nudge at work. Would this resonate? Would it feel like it totally missed the mark? What would your reaction be?” We learn from those interactions what doesn’t feel right, based on an employee’s situation, or environment, or if they say something strong like, “No one would ever do this in our situation.” We then map all this feedback and data within our software platform infrastructure to various components of our nudges. Basically, we believe companies can use data and some common sense to create constructive conversation and interaction with employees to drive change, at scale.
Q: How do you tune the nudges to make them more likely to work?
Jessie: A key consideration is that we closely analyze characteristics of the jobs and tune our nudges to address what is in people’s control. We don’t want to suggest to a front-line manager that they should increase people’s compensation, even if we find that compensation is an issue, because the manager has no control over it. Instead, that might be something that we nudge executives on. We work in the realm of identifying the possible and highlighting those options.
For managers involved in day-to-day store operations, it’s more about, “How can you have team meetings that create clarity on what everybody is doing?” Or “How can you give people recognition or give them small chances to have more autonomy in their jobs and make decisions when it’s possible?”. Over time, when employees see that their responses to prompts and nudges result in real changes — the company is listening, they start to trust what their company is doing with Humu and participate more openly. These examples may sound obvious, but simply creating more awareness and reminders can drive changes in manager and employee relationships and engagement.
Q: This sounds great but what is the ROI for a company employing front line workers?
Jessie: It’s quite meaningful. For one customer, we saw about a 4% increase in new hire retention over two months and it went up to 7% over time. For a restaurant brand we worked with, they were specifically interested in the 90-day quit problem. We sent nudges designed to improve the areas in which each store was struggling, with the ultimate goal of increasing retention. We were able to look at their data over time and, basically, see that nudges increased retention. The effect got bigger as they used Humu over time.
Q: What form factors do you use to deliver both the research and the interventions?
Jessie: Nudges right now are sent by whatever communication channel people use. It can be Slack, it can be Microsoft Teams, it can be email. Obviously, in stores those channels are not usually used but we can send out nudges via apps or emails. If it’s not possible to reach the front-line workers, we often work just with the manager level which does have access to those apps and coach them on how to improve their teams. In fact, we see a ton of evidence in our data showing how important managers are — even simply seeming to care, or showing empathy, and trying to make things better makes a big difference. We see that when teams report a noticeable difference of managers taking action on survey results and trying to make things better, their people are just way happier and are more likely to stick around.
Managers are a huge lever for behavioral change and team performance. If their team is productive, if their team has a good experience, they have a big impact on employee retention and happiness. Even when we’re not able to deliver nudges directly to the individual employees but just to the manager, we still see improvement in overall performance. This may sound obvious, but many front-line brands still make upleveling managers a low priority. We think our platform can show why this is such low-hanging fruit for improving so many ways these organizations operate.
Q: Could you quantify the impact of a manager?
Jessie: Here’s an example. We looked at people who were hired either pre- or post-pandemic, and we found that people who were hired post-pandemic tended to be less happy. They had less trust, less engagement, and were less likely to stick around. However, if they reported that their manager had done something to improve the culture or to use feedback results to make things better, it completely wiped out that effect. There was statistically then no difference between pre-pandemic hires and those who had been hired post-pandemic and had seen their manager make changes to improve.
Q: How many nudges does it tend to take until things start to change?
Jessie: Behavior change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not like we’re expecting magic the next day or after everyone receives one nudge. Usually, our next touch point for an in-depth assessment of whether things have changed is six months later, and we’ve consistently found impact. We looked specifically at how many people within a team environment need to take action in order for it to create real change. We found that on the low end, across all our customers, if only 27% of employees engaged and took action, this level of participation resulted in measurable organization-wide changes on key metrics like turnover and employee engagement. These little tipping points and causing small changes can really add up. However, trying to nudge employees ad hoc is challenging because nudges must compete with many other organizations priorities. So, figuring out a systematic way to do this — with or without Humu — is critical to success.
Q: What are some of the nudges or some of the things that worked in that food service environment?
Jessie: One specific example we saw was a case where there was a policy prohibiting long fingernails — a state-based policy. We noticed that in some states we were getting a ton of comments back from employees saying, “I don’t understand why my manager is trying to dictate my personal life, and why they won’t let me wear my nails the way I want.” We nudged the managers to simply explain the policy to their teams and said “Just share. You’re not just being mean, and you’re not just trying to rule their lives.” They did, and the problem went away immediately, and employees were happier. Transparency makes a big difference.
Q: What were some of the levers that you found that were effective that would give people more autonomy in this environment?
Jessie: It wasn’t that we would know the specifics. It was more like, “As a manager, take a minute today to think about where you could give someone a choice about how to do their work.” Or “Where you think something may not be going well, instead of just doing something about it, ask for input.” It’s more about providing autonomy in small decisions or having your opinion be heard. For example, we saw that when employees were empowered to provide samples of menu items and to be more creative explaining the foods to guests, it made those employees happier and more engaged.
Q: Did the employees’ perception change not only of the manager, but also of the organization? How closely linked are the two?
Jessie: We did see this drive perception changes at the organizational level, as well. We have found that those changes are usually highly correlated, and especially in front-line environments because your manager is the face and voice of the organization from an employee perspective. We also do see a lot of variation from store to store, which demonstrated the leverage that a manager has over turnover and performance. Good managers can have a tremendous impact.
Q: Have you tied your nudges to store performance or profits?
Jessie: We found 29% higher NPS scores for customers at stores that are highly engaged with nudges. Essentially, the customers’ satisfaction with their store experience is correlated with the employees’ perceptions of the store and their work environment. But what can be challenging for front line managers is how they can identify and empower the small actions that are big levers without upsetting the structured operating procedures and rules required for restaurants, retail and hospitality.
Q: It sounds like a lot of what you’re finding and pushing is somewhat common sense, but you’re adding the data and the proof behind it.
Jessie: That is true. But I would emphasize, if this was so easy, then everyone would already do it. It’s kind of like eating well and exercising. We all know it’s good for us. But strategies to get us to do it more are incredibly valuable. We don’t claim to have a monopoly on nudges either. That said, we use a lot of behavioral tactics from research and that we have tested out — kind of like a coach. We are not teaching organizations and employees something new but are more about getting them to close that gap between what managers and employees intend to do and what they actually do by leveraging behavioral science. We are providing structure and encouragement. People constantly tell us things like, “Oh, I really love the nudges because they allow me to bring up things with my managers or bring up things with my direct reports that I otherwise felt uncomfortable bringing up.” Or “I can go into the meeting and say, ‘Hey manager, I got a nudge telling me to do this, so can I ask you for that?”’ It gives them permission to engage and that’s critical to starting the dialogue that always precedes real change.
