Jeff Fox, Principal at Aon, continues his conversation with Simon Stapleton, about behavioural science in the workplace. In this episode, Jeff and Simon discuss the strategies being adopted by organisations to help people adapt and be resilient as business spaces and communication channels face massive change.

Transcript:

Simon Stapleton: As we've discovered over the last few weeks, we’re able to use the platform in different ways quite quickly. We're able to innovate on new kind of assessments and new products almost within days after we've conceived an idea and identified a problem. What do you think about that? How is how is the agility of the Neurotech® platform helping Aon with the product development and innovation?

Jeff Fox: When I think back to this journey, it started within the employee experience domain, as broad as that is, precisely because it was vague and this tool helped give us a line of sight to how you can measure employee experience, and I guess our vision was, that's where we spend a lot of our time, focused on that. But very rapidly, as clients have developed needs, and come to us with problem domains that they need help with, we've been able to point the Neurotech® solution to a whole host of different problems and what we love about Neurotech® is just that, because we love helping our clients solve problems.  It's what we're about. And so, in that time, since we started the employee experience journey, we probably now have four or five products that have spiralled out. We've got one that focuses on Total Reward, we have one that focuses on Future of Work, we are now looking at one that can help us with the whole topic of ESG, which is obviously a very topical conversation; the whole issue of how organisations can help understand that purpose, which is just, you know, terrifically resonant with clients. So, in a very short space of time, we've heard these problem statements from clients, “How can we help understand how our employees feel about these issues?” We've taken the Neurotech® and we've pointed it towards the problems and we've developed products that are then being deployable - in some cases within days - within weeks from conception through to deployment and rolled it out for our clients, and then really sort of got below that surface line again, on that particular problem. So it's just hugely agile. And that's what clients demand at the moment: they need agile solutions, because the world is changing so quickly as we've experienced through the last sort of year or so, what was a client issue before the pandemic, now, is a whole multitude of new issues to face; it’s just agile solutions and Neurotech® is really good for that.

SS: Particularly when it comes to resilience, and right now identifying burnout, there's a lot in the press about a whole bow wave of issues hitting organisations really to do with burnout and the exhaustion coming from working from home and isolation for such a long time. Where do you see Neurotech® and implicit methods making a difference?

JF:  So, I think we're in a different world now.  We're in a place where concepts like hybrid working models will become the norm. People will work from home.  When you're looking at me here, the room I'm sat in is the room I've spent the last 18 months in. It's difficult for employers to know how people in those circumstances are feeling because they're no longer in the office, they're no longer on client sites as much that there's that lack of line of sight. So, the world that we're in now, and the whole topic of resilience is how to prosper in a world that is more difficult, where the employer doesn't have that line of sight. So, the crucial part about the Neurotech® tool here, for me, is it gives a way to help really find out how employees are in this new world and how we look at hybrid working and think about concepts of resilience; really understand what that means and then do things which can really help the employee in a meaningful way. I think that's the crucial difference - not just sort of token gestures. It's about doing things that can really help the employee become more resilient in a world that for a lot of us is new. I had no expectation to spend as much time in this room as I have spent. I've been productive, but it brings with it a whole host of new challenges and I think for many employers, we haven't got a rulebook on what that looks like to help employees become resilient in that place, so I think it's hugely topical, hugely relevant to the issues that we face right now.

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