Grace Cormier's Profile

Super interesting! Very insightful that you’re predicting the use of social media to track employee well-being based on trends in education. I agree with this assessment, particularly given that it’s already being used to a certain extent in hiring. I agree that social media is highly curated and a challenging source of accurate information. However, aside from the highly curated environment, just question whether companies should use data from employees on what is supposed to be a private platform. I understand that people can use to make their profile public or private, and choose what they want to post know their employer might see it, but there is a reason why boundaries are drawn between work and life. I don’t need my company knowing what I do on weeknights and the weekend or how I’m feeling about it. That business should be left up to me.

You raise some really interesting points! I couldn’t agree with you more when you say “Last, and worst of all, the system dehumanizes management”. I think this is a growing and pressing issue when it comes to incorporating new technology into people analytics practices. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. I also think we’re not knowledgeable enough about the implications (particularly 2nd and 3rd order effects) of using such technology. I’d really like to see a transparent analysis of the benefit of using these technologies against the costs – and would guess they’d be marginal to null. I think using these kinds of technologies are really hard to explain to employees as anything more than trying to get them to work harder, faster, and better – more like machines and less like humans.

Hi Miho,

Interesting thoughts! Satisfaction in coach-coachee pairs is a really understudied topic – we’re not really sure what makes for a coach coach-coachee pair, so like you, I’m curious about how they’re matching people. While I think matching on demographics is an ok start, I think there might be more room for improvement when thinking about relational preferences (i.e., “the soft stuff”). Further, I wonder if left to decide for ourselves, we’d even make a good decision. We might think that we’d want a coach that’s similar to us, but in reality, coaches that are similar to us aren’t good at developing us. That’s where I think the massive amount of data that BetterUp has could be really helpful because we’re able to see how certain variables in a coach-coachee pair do in terms of satisfaction and development/ performance.

I know BetterUp well (partnered with them on some research) and while I agree that there’s potential for an overuse of an algorithm, they do a fantastic job of letting coachees (1) understand the ways their data is private and protected and (2) see and use their data to their advantage. This is the real benefit of BetterUp – they provide executive level coaching for people at all levels of an org,

Thanks for the post!

Grace