Once the novelty of working from home wears off, and for many it already has, comes the challenge of maintaining connection, building affiliation and building cultures.
The jewel of Australia’s tech sector, Atlassian, has been lauded for giving staff the privilege of working from home forever. But when I posted the story on our team Slack channel, I added a comment warning of the longer-term impact of “remote forever”.
One of our senior team members replied: “Why do people travel in the morning to an office, in a packed tram/train carrying a laptop, then work on that laptop only to carry it back home in a packed train, wasting precious time? That looked comical to me for a long time.”
When I worked for another technology company, we spent a lot of energy trying to convince leadership that WFH did not mean a free ride and would, in fact, unleash productivity and improve engagement. COVID-19 has brought forward the idea of WFH as an alternative arrangement for many who would not have otherwise considered it.
While we may be revelling in the success of dismantling the long-held bias that you need to see someone at work to trust they are doing the work, it comes with its own challenges around organisational relevance.
Does it matter what company you work for if the only difference between one job and another is for whom you are completing a task, and perhaps the one or two people with whom you work closely?
Work is a relationship, and relationships thrive on intimate and frequent connections.
When we all worked in offices, some of that intimacy was built by the serendipity of conversations you had while going about your day’s work.
There was always the potential to catch someone from outside your team and share an idea and solicit a different perspective. There was an ease of connections and interactions that can be hard to replicate in a remote work context.
How do you look out for people, mentor them, develop them, when your interactions are all booked in, bounded within a strict working day?
Being remote is a little bit like trying to establish a long-distance relationship which, as many know, has the chances of success stacked against it.
Then there is the influence of place, and of space. At REA Group, where I worked for some years, the building fed the culture. Its design and redesign had been carefully thought through to maximise connections and space to collaborate – and not just with those in your immediate team.
Why do people go to church to pray, the pub to drink, and the footy to watch their team, when they have the Bible at home, beer in the fridge and a TV in the living room? Because they are looking for connection, community and inspiration.
Once the novelty of WFH wears off, and for many it already has, comes the challenge of maintaining connection, building affiliation and building cultures when people and teams are not physically spending time together in a shared space.
Ongoing remote work presents practical challenges for organisations, particularly around company culture and organisational HR.
Is there a way to assess performance when you can’t see people at work? How do you look out for people, mentor them, develop them, when your interactions are all booked in, bounded within a strict working day? What way to acknowledge someone for something you heard they did well, as you might if you jump in a lift together?
Diversity of perspective
There is a real risk our employment relationship becomes transactional, which affects engagement, which then affects productivity.
We know from our own work in this space, personality is not 16 types on a table. It is way more nuanced and diverse than that. In a population of 85,000, equal men and women, we find at least 400 uniquely identifiable personality types.
We live in a world of hyper-personalisation, from our morning news feed to our Netflix profile based on our viewing history. How can an organisation retain that diversity of perspective. That is when it usually thinks of two binary ways of working: in an office or at home? It can’t. That is why the future of work has to involve a new type of technology. One that can navigate the rich mix of types we work with and adapt to their communication and working style.
I have championed for WFH when in senior HR positions. However, this experience highlighted the many things I might have taken for granted in an office environment. It has nothing to do with fancy decor and an ergonomic chair. It’s more the human moments of serendipitous connection that disappeared so quickly, almost without time to say goodbye.
It would be great to think we all emerge from this situation with a mind to honour the things we have learnt about our “work selves” and, most importantly, to build company cultures that thrive by accommodating those diverse needs.
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World-first research reveals ChatGPT is an extrovert
ChatGPT is more extroverted, conscientious, and more open to experiences than the average working age human, new research from Sapia.ai, the world’s only smart chat platform powered by AI, has found.
If these generative AI models were job candidates responding to interview questions, what kind of personality would they project in their natural form? ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) and more recently GPT-4 are built using a process that includes “reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)” to produce responses which are less likely to make up facts, be toxic or harmful in their sentiment compared to the earlier GPT-2. Could this friendliness and politeness be verified through the personality these models project? These were some of the questions Sapia Labs team set out to answer.
“We all know ChatGPT can be prompted to respond in different ways and, as AI models, personality is not directly applicable to them. However, given these models generate responses similar to humans, we wanted to better understand the personality projected by these models when they are not prompted to be a certain personality, or in its natural form, and be able to distinguish its responses from that of a human,” Sapia.ai’s Chief Data Scientist Dr. Buddhi Jayatilleke said.
The study, a first of its kind, analysed over 6,000 responses from GPT-2, ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) and GPT-4, and cross-examined them with Sapia.ai’s dataset of over 2.5 million candidates across 47 countries with over 1 billion words shared by job candidates. Sapia Labs used their industry-leading personality inference models based on InterviewBERT, a fine tuned version of Google’s BERT large language model to infer the personality dimensions similar to the well known HEXACO model of personality.
Their findings provide fascinating insights into the nature of these generative models. Both ChatGPT and GPT-4 scored significantly higher on the dimensions of honesty/humility, agreeableness, and consciousness compared to GPT-2. These results align well with OpenAI’s description of how ChatGPT models differ from earlier GPT models. The higher honesty/humility and agreeableness is consistent with modesty, politeness, and friendly responses. Additionally, the greater likelihood to follow directions and provide accurate information aligns with ChatGPT’s higher conscientiousness. But the most interesting finding is that both ChatGPT and GPT-4 showed significantly higher levels of extroversion, conscientiousness, and open to experience compared to the human benchmark dataset. In other words the newer GPT models trained with human-in-the-loop project a more sociable, open minded and diligent personality.
Global brands including Woolworths Group, Qantas and Spark NZ trust Sapia.ai to accelerate and enhance their recruitment and promotion processes. A conversational, Natural Language Processing (NLP) based AI chat interview, assesses and screens for the best talent at scale via an easy to use messaging platform.
In addition to improving diversity outcomes by eliminating unconscious bias, it also allows companies to re-allocate thousands of hours spent screening talent towards higher value tasks.
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SuccessFactors + Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring
The good people at SuccessFactors have created an HR software system to help you deliver business strategy alignment, team execution, and maximum people performance. They’re passionate about helping you empower your workforce. And with Sapia, you can now take full advantage of SuccessFactors ATS to get ahead of your competitors by integrating Sapia’s interview automation for faster, fairer and better hiring results.
Decrease SuccessFactors ATS hiring complexity
From attracting candidates of diverse backgrounds and delivering an exceptional candidate experience, you’re expected to do a lot! All whilst you’re selecting from thousands of applicants…
The good news is that technology has advanced to support recruiters. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful SuccessFactors ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates love.
You can now:
- Reduce your screening time by up to 90%
- Increase your candidate satisfaction to near 100%
- Achieve interview completion rates over 90%
- And reduce screening bias for good
Sapia + SuccessFactors
Gone are the days of screening CVs, followed by phone screens to find the best talent. The number of people applying for each job has grown 5-10 times in size recently. Reading each CV is simply no longer an option. In any case, the attributes that are markers of a high performer often aren’t in CVs and the risk of increasing bias is high.
You can now streamline your SuccessFactors process by integrating Sapia’s interview automation with SuccessFactors.
We’ve created a quick, easy and fair hiring process that candidates love.
- Create a vacancy in SuccessFactors, and a Sapia interview link will be created.
- Include the link in your advertising. Every candidate will have an opportunity to complete a FirstInterview via chat.
- See results as soon as candidates complete their interview. Each candidate’s scores, rank, personality assessment, role-based traits and communication skills are available as soon as they complete the interview. Every candidate will receive automated, personalised feedback.
By sending out one simple interview link, you nail speed, quality and candidate experience in one hit.
Integrate SuccessFactors and get ahead
Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai is available to all SuccessFactors users. You can automate interviewing, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort! Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.
Experience the Sapia’s Chat Interview for yourself
The interview that all candidates love
As unemployment rates rise, it’s more important than ever to show empathy for candidates and add value when we can. Using Sapia, every single candidate gets a FirstInterview through an engaging text experience on their mobile device, whenever it suits them. Every candidate receives personalised MyInsights feedback, with helpful coaching tips which candidates love.
Together, Sapia and SuccessFactors deliver an approach that is:
- Relevant—move beyond the CV to the attributes that matter most to you: grit, curiosity, accountability, critical thinking, agility and communication skills
- Respectful—give every single person an interview and never ghost a candidate again
- Dignified—show you value people’s time by providing every single applicant personal feedback
- Fair—avoid video in the first round interviews and take an approach that’s 100% blind to gender, age, ethnicity and other irrelevant attributes
- Familiar—text chat interviewing is not only highly efficient, it’s also familiar to people of all ages
There are thousands of comments just like this …
“I have never had an interview like this in my life and it was really good to be able to speak without fear of judgment and have the freedom to do so.
The feedback is also great. This is a great way to interview people as it helps an individual to be themselves.
The response back is written with a good sense of understanding and compassion.
I don’t know if it is a human or a robot answering me, but if it is a robot then technology is quite amazing.”
Take it for a 2-minute test drive here >
Recruiters love using artificial intelligence in hiring
Recruiters love the TalentInsights Sapia surface in SuccessFactors as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.
Together, Sapia and SuccessFactors deliver an approach that is:
- Fast—Ai-powered scores and rankings make shortlisting candidates quicker
- Insightful—Deep dive into the unique personality and other traits of each candidate
- Fair—Candidates are scored and ranked on their responses. The system is blind to other attributes and regularly checked for bias.
- Streamlined—Our stand-alone LiveInterview mobile app makes arranging assessment centres easy. Automated record-keeping reduces paperwork and ensures everyone is fairly assessed.
- Time-saving—Automating the first interview screening process and second-round scheduling delivers 90% time savings against a standard recruiting process.
Don’t believe us, read the reviews!
See Recruiter Reviews here >
HR Directors and CHROs love reliable bias tracking
Well-intentioned organisations have been trying to shift the needle on the bias that impacts diversity and inclusion for many years, without significant results.
Together, Sapia and SuccessFactors deliver an approach that is:
- Measurable—DiscoverInsights, our operations dashboard that provides clear reporting on recruitment, including pipeline shortlisting, candidate experience and bias tracking.
- Competitive—The Sapia and SuccessFactors experience is loved by candidates, ensuring you’ll attract the best candidates, and hire faster than competitors.
- Scalable—Whether you’re hiring one hundred people, or one thousand, you can hire the best person for the job, on time, every time.
- Best-in-class—Sapia easily integrates with SuccessFactors to provide you with a best-in-class AI-enabled HRTech stack.
Getting started is easy
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Does diversity start with the way you hire?
To find out how to interpret bias in recruitment, we also have a great eBook on inclusive hiring.
In the last month alone, four well-known consumer brands, including Netflix and Hubspot, have published their glossy self-assessments of their progress against Diversity and Inclusion.
If you look at the hard data, though, there is still so little real progress despite so many initiatives and positive intent.
The recent Bersin report shows that, surprisingly, diversity in the U.S work context is going backwards.
That’s because it has to involve some discomfort that cannot be avoided.
One of the first things companies need to do to improve Diversity and Inclusion is to scrutinise their hiring and promotion process.
- Are you relying 100% on human judgement? Decades of research has proved we are biased, especially in hiring.
- Is there any objective data captured about the candidate to ensure a fairer and smarter decision? CV data does not count as objective data; neither does having five subjective viewpoints on a candidate from 5 different interviewees.
- Are you using screening tools or assessments like video interviews? These exclude large chunks of the candidate pool, i.e. introverts, people with autism, people of colour, people who don’t like playing games.
A recent post about the impact of non-inclusive hiring on a 21-year-old job-seeker attracted 35k views and countless efforts to help him find a job. 
It was great to see, but what about the other few million candidates out there who haven’t had the benefit of a social media post to get a job?
Unless we solve the root of the problem, the post achieved little.
Inclusiveness is often a journey, but the most immediate thing we can all control is removing bias from hiring and promotion.
This is literally something that you can start doing tomorrow. Addressing systemic bias is more complex but removing unconscious bias is something we can solve for now.
Get me out of here!
From a candidate’s perspective, applying for a job is demoralising and exclusive. It often involves playing a game, glamping up for a video interview, mind-numbing multi-choice questions, only to be ghosted 99% of the time.
We have been speaking about candidate-first for a decade, now is the time to do it.