Data Driven Employee Management
How digitization can make work a good life
Hans, our CEO, on the paradigm shift in HR and internal communication policies
Employee ownership has been a controversial topic for decades. Does it benefit the company and the employees? Or does it make them lazy?
It seems to be a question of principle, but you can also see it with a practical view. Strong leadership is necessary, but centralization is also a problem, as it leads to a top-down view.
From the perspective of employees in their daily work, their view is different. For them, the workplace and the context in which they work with colleagues, customers, and suppliers is an important part of the ecosystem in which they build and develop their lives. It is an ecosystem in that it encompasses a large part of the conditions under which one's needs can be met and dreams can be realized.
In the search and chase for better conditions, it has become common to look over one's shoulder for better jobs. This leads to weak commitment to the company and limited involvement in everyday work.
Prosperland is a way to involve employees (or customers) in the daily decisions that affect them.
The prerequisite is that everyone, company and employees, is committed to a common goal: the quality of life of employees in their daily work.
Prosperland is fast and down-to-earth at the daily application level. It's all about the changes in everyday work. Digitalization, AI, customer demands - change is constant and a challenge for employees and the company. Good or bad, things are what they are.
On the other hand, there is an agreement that at Prosperland all changes should make a positive contribution to the quality of life. After every change, there is a short check-up by those affected: How has it affected me? An improvement or a deterioration?
Technically, Prosperland can be considered a "social" IOT solution. Sensors provide data that is processed at the effect level and converted into correction signals that make an adjustment. A closed loop. However, this ‘Social IoT’ approach requires a number of innovations that are part of the Prosperland technology.
The main innovation of Prosperland is the definition of social sensor points in everyday life where well-being is decided. Prosperland uses a system of 80 sensors that represent the "collective" experience of everyday life.
It has shown that five or six of these sensor points are critical for each individual. The range of possibilities covers the full 80.
Innovation 1 - Social sensors
Innovation 2 - Virtualization
Virtualization helps to solve the biggest problem of all companies with remote access and a dispersed workforce. The different types of daily work environments that people are prone to remain invisible unless you make them comparable and integrate them.
Virtualizing the collective workday creates a common reference "reality" that shows how changes affect the workday experienced by everyone.
Virtualization comes with simplification (at the "optimal" information level).
There is a belief that more information about an issue improves model performance in figuring out what matters and how. In reality, this is not the case.
If you look for the best explanation of what makes employees happy or makes them leave, you may discover 100 things that can have an impact. In fact, they all do. But what does the picture look like when we assume they interact? It shows that AI models with fewer variables work better when you take away the less effective ones. It is likely that from your initial 100, you reduce to 10 to get the best level of performance of your models.
In any social body, a number between 7 and 12 items generates the best performance level of information. Below that level, information is missing. Above this level, there is more noise than added substance.
Innovation 3: - The Information Optimum
Innovation 4: - The transformation of subjectivity into objectivity
One source of innovation is the use of artificial intelligence. AI has taught us to understand subjectivity. Subjectivity is the interest-driven perception of reality, which is the only "reality" for each of us. Thus, true reality exists as a collection of all subjective realities. This problem was insurmountable for a long time, and we made do with averages, knowing that they did not exist in 'reality'.
AI has made differentiation possible and given us insight into the plethora of different subjective worlds, representing the chaos and making it understandable - and orderly.
The bottom line is that with the help of AI, we are able to determine which are the critical factors (sensor points) to influence the well-being of a group of employees. Even more, which ones make them particularly happy and which ones make them particularly unhappy.
Is everything we identify 'true'? Are these really the most important factors? In hundreds of projects on all continents, a picture has emerged that is independent of culture. The essential points can be seen in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the everyday life of a company or a community, this can manifest itself in different ways. Is what we talk about really what makes people tick? We let the AI learn and compare it to reality. This gives us a quality score, which corresponds to the accuracy with which the model predicts factual realities.
Innovation 5: - Measurement of the Social Benefit
The proof of the pudding: Integration into everyday life
One of Prosperland's goals is to simplify everyday life, especially where changes can work in one direction or the other. Another goal is to decentralize local decisions in order to streamline administration and give responsibility to the people concerned. Prosperland is also a tool for digital democracy.
All the measuring technology in the world is of little use if there is no attention. Prosperland is a way to reflect everyday life with the purpose of better identification and bonding. The results are public, and they are daily content with reference to the working life of all. Daily action lists make it easy to turn insight into action with measurable success.
Prosperland lives on commitment, commitment comes with attention, attention comes with communication, and communication comes with the right spirit. A Prosperland alone is only the toolbox for expanded communication. However, it has been proven that commitment grows by itself when it becomes visible that something is happening.
That's why Prosperland is integrated into the company's internal data flow. It has its own discussion and decision forums, its own app and a desktop application. But in the end, only Prosperland's internal logic is needed when all these communication tools are already available.