Our Vision for EmployInsight
How we think about EmployInsight
I’ve always had a personal passion for what I call “The science of people.” This led me to pursuing an Applied Psychology Masters at UPenn. What I realized was that over the last 15-20 years, psychologists have gotten better at helping us measure innate human strengths and resources (such as emotional intelligence, GRIT, character strengths, or resilience factors), but the reason why organizations and individuals weren’t benefitting from the ability to collect this data was because no one had built a software system to make it easy to use this data.
That’s what we’re doing at EmployInsight. Our web-based platform makes it easy to measure, manage, and use data about psychological, emotional, and cognitive resources. It also enables organizations to measure how different jobs utilize these resources.
Our first application uses this data to help organizations improve hiring – leading to new employees who are more engaged and more likely to love their work.
Our second application will let managers or team leaders easily collect information about their teams strengths, and view analytics of how these strengths define the team. We expect this product to be available later this year at www.Strengths360.com.
Why it matters
Think about how much time you spend at work. Even if you only work 9-5, that’s 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. 40 hours at work. How much time do you spend awake per week? Let’s say you average 7 hours of sleep per night. That means that you spend 17 hours awake per day, which adds to 119 hours a week. So out of total awake hours, you spend at least 1/3 of it at work.
If you’re like most people, it probably seems like even more than a third as you would add commute time, time catching up on email, etc.
What’s my point? Well, we hear a lot about the idea of work life balance. Seeing what a large percentage of our time we spend at work, I think it’s much more important for us to be involved with work that contributes to our life. But how can we achieve that? When we work, we’re applying our skills and abilities to produce outputs, and we get compensated for doing so.
But there’s more to it than that. We bring other resources to our job such as our character strengths, how we’re emotionally intelligent, and in which ways we deal with adversity through resilience.
When our work fits well with our skills and abilities, but asks us to draw on psychological, emotional, or cognitive resources that aren’t a match, we end up being stressed out, un-engaged, and unhappy.
By better understanding ourselves and what all the resources we bring to the table are, we’re more likely to take on work that we both love and do well. For organizations, understanding how specific work uses these resources, you can be more likely to put someone in a position where they’re engaged with their work and it contributes to their happiness and well-being.
The data that helps us understand ourselves and our work in these deeper levels is what EmployInsight is all about. We want to make this easier to gather and use whether it’s in hiring, career pathing, professional development, team building, performance review, or even goal setting. That’s our vision. Organizations that run more effectively with employees who love their work. We look forward to making that vision a reality.
Thanks,
Sean