The Science of BetterUp Flashcards
How is Science embedded into BetterUp
There are 40+ scientists throughout BU with advanced degrees, primarily doctoral degrees in industrial-organizational psychology.
They research how people thrive and workplace performance and how that helps companies grow.
They study how interventions like coaching lead to changes in behavior bc that’s what we want to drive here. We can be prescriptive in driving specific outcomes for you.
It’s embedded across every team, in how we design, build, market, and sell our offerings.
Describe BetterUp Labs
We created an entire entity to for cutting-edge, world-class, interdisciplinary scientific research to understand and accelerating human flourishing specifically in the context of the workplace,
This is how we understand how people thrive in order to optimize their workplace performance and help their companies grow.
They prepare studies and white papers that we push out to the greater community
Boots on the Ground
Bridge the research-practitioner divide
“boots on the ground” behavioral scientists who leverage scientific theory & research to enable BetterUp to build products that have a measurable positive impact on our members, coaches, and partners.
Describe Positive Psychology
When people know their strengths and are prompted to use their strengths in learning, they are more motivated and effective at changing their behavior.
they display greater engagement, motivation, and energy.
Positive emotions broaden our thinking and enhance our creativity and innovation.
Describe failures in Learning
Can’t practice
A failure to transfer what is learned because there is no opportunity to practice the behavior
(e.g., a person reads a book to learn new information but has no opportunity to apply that information to their day-to-day life).
Online learning
Not enough support after learning (e.g., a person takes an online course on a new management practice, begins to apply it to their team at work without an accountability partner or coach, and gradually stops doing the new behavior).
3 day offite -
High initial impact but lacked support afterward for practice (e.g., a company holds a 3-day offsite, and without ongoing accountability set up, the employees fail to practice the new behaviors when they return to their regular routines).
A Better way to learn
Sessions take place in a bite-sized format (30 or 45 minutes).
Sessions are spaced out in a frequent, regular cadence (weekly or biweekly) over a longer period of time (at least 6-12 months).
Sessions are embedded in the routine flow of work.
Coaching focuses on a person’s strengths as well as their growth opportunities.
Outside of sessions, a person is supported by just-in-time micro-learning resources and quick access to their coach through messaging.
The goals a person sets and the outcomes they achieve are measurable through our platform.
Personalization
We built algorithms to identify the needs of an individual employee at a particular moment. Our data science and AI teams consistently find that individual needs vary.
One-size-fits-all approaches fail to account for the unique experiences and needs that each person brings to their learning & doing.
Makes learning effective.
We need to meet our employees where they are, and a highly scalable, AI-driven solution that combines expert human coaching with interactive micro-learning is the best way to help them develop and flourish in unprecedented ways!
Our dataset
We have the largest set of data on individuals who have been coached. This includes their growth areas and strengths at the start of coaching, which mindsets and behaviors they grew in, what content they accessed as part of their development, what topics they discussed with their coach, etc.
Describe the one size fits all approach that companies use in L&D
much of the $240B spent on corporate L&D goes to waste every year because most L&D programs are not tailored to meet the individual needs of employees.
It seems to be most cost-efficient.
We move people through the same workshops, lectures, and virtual classroom seminars, where everyone is expected to learn at the same pace and develop the exact same skills.
‘New Manager’ program.
These standardized company-wide programs are ineffective because they aren’t tailored to meet the individual needs of your top employees.
Share some data around how individual needs impact learning
All HiPos are not the same. For example, women leaders are 25% more likely to focus on work-life balance than male leaders
newly promoted managers are 35% more likely to struggle with ‘time management compared to experienced managers, and
leaders overseeing large teams are 70% more likely to focus on ‘strategic planning skills’ versus HiPo’s that have a smaller scope.
For example, if a manager just went through M&A or restructuring, they are 30% more likely to focus on ‘Stress Management’.
Coach Matching
Our algorithms match an individual to the coach who will work best for them based on their individual learning preferences and goals.
over 3,000 coaches all over the world that bring varied experiences, backgrounds, and expertise in different coaching methods.
We take about 150 factors into consideration to make the right match, and we constantly monitor the performance of our AI algorithms to track their efficacy.
As we collect more data over time, our algorithms get smarter. Two years ago our coach matching algorithm achieved over 80% accuracy, now it consistently performs at over 97% accuracy.
Nuances which prove personalization
Employees at smaller orgs are 50% less likely to work on ‘stress management’ but twice as likely to work on ‘goal setting and planning’ when compared to employees at larger corporations.
US employees are 23% more likely to work on ‘Managing career transitions’, whereas their counterparts in other regions are 21% more likely to work on ‘Coaching and developing others’ and 10% more likely to work on ‘Influence and assertiveness’.
At BetterUp, we offer personalized programs in major international markets around the world
BetterUp for smaller companies too
Employees at smaller orgs are 50% less likely to work on ‘stress management’ but twice as likely to work on ‘goal setting and planning’ when compared to employees at larger corporations.
In the past, these small and medium-size businesses were left out because they didn’t have the resources and scale of large enterprises to offer personalized L&D programs. With BetterUp, they can offer programs that are tailored exactly to the needs of their employees.
