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Q: What is the most interesting thing you've learned about psychology in the workplace?
A: I think there are so many things that we could pick out to focus on. One of the things that might be of interest to SpeakerHub listeners is a project that we've been working on recently about how to measure inspiration.
There was an events management firm who often employed the services of public speakers to speak at their events, and they wanted to try and measure scientifically whether there had been a shift in people's inspiration levels before and after they heard the person speak.
Our project was to come up with a questionnaire that people would complete before the event, just after the event, and then again after three months: to see first of all the shift in inspiration, but secondly to see what kind of behaviors, activities, they would be doing differently as a result of seeing the speaker.
It's quite nice, because it reflects my fascination with psychology in general, the fact that you can measure things, put a number to them, that you wouldn't naturally have thought could be measured.
I think going all the way back to my undergraduate years. The first thing I learned was how memory can hold seven, plus or minus two, items in your short term memory, and I thought that was amazing that you could just put a number to it. I think the kind of work that we're doing at the moment around inspiration, trying to measure new aspects of human psychology via psychometric tests, is the most fascinating for me.
Q: Can you tell me a bit about what a psychometric test is?
A: In a nutshell, psychometric refers to the measurement of the mind. Your traditional psychometric test could cover any aspect of the human psyche. It could be your personality, so the way in which you prefer to think, feel, and behave at work, it could cover your motivation, so what gets you out of bed in the morning, what leaves you going out of the office on a Friday punching the air with joy, or conversely with slumped shoulders and a sad look on your face. Also it will cover things like aptitudes, so your ability to reason with words, with numbers, with concepts.
Psychometric is any test that seeks to measure that, but then we often take it a step further and seek to prove things like validity. So if someone takes a test today, will their profile still hold true in a year's time? Will it actually have measureable outcomes to the business on how it’s performing? So yes, it's the measurement of the mind.
Q: How do you go about creating these tests? How do you formulate the questions? What does your decision process look like?
A: I think it's important, first of all, to establish what you wish to measure. And that's often where clients will come to us saying well we want to find people who are right for the job, and we'll need to perhaps take the discussion back a bit and say well how clear are you on what success looks like, and what qualities lead to that? So the first step is to establish what psychological aspect you wish to measure that's going to have the biggest outcome on job performance?
Once we have that clearly defined, and let's say it was a set of personality characteristics, we then seek to write some questions. So these could be simple statements, they could be even images, they could be video extracts even, but we would seek to come up with a bank of questions which we would then trial.
We would start to analyze people's responses to those questions statistically to weed out those that are performing well and those that are performing less well, and eventually after realms of trialing and honing we would end up with a questionnaire that we were confident predicts performance, but also is non-discriminatory and is easy. And ideally enjoyable for the participant to complete.
That’s something, that's a trend that I've noticed in assessment over the past few years at least, is that companies are far more mindful of trying to make the assessment engaging or informative, and we've worked on these tools called situational judgment tests where you give someone a little vignette, day in the life of the role, and then pose some dilemmas for them to answer, how would you respond in this situation, so that it's not just a chance for the organization to assess the candidate but also the candidate to assess the job and say would I enjoy it there?
Especially for roles that could have unexpected elements. So we’ve been working quite a bit with social work organizations and teacher training organizations where people might like the idea in principle, but when they uncover some of the realities they might say well that's not for me, or that is for me. So it could help them to make an informed choice about their application as well.
Q: So it becomes a two way street instead of it just being the company testing out the potential employee.
A: That's right, that's right.
Q: Thank you for sharing that with me. Can you tell me a little bit about why you got involved with psychology in the first place?
A: If I'm telling you the truth, psychology goes all the way back to my A-levels. When I was about sixteen I wanted to study English and history, and I was advised to choose an easy third subject because they said those two subjects are pretty tough, so I thought psychology seems like a nice subject, a relaxing one, one that's not going to be too mentally taxing. But when I started it, it very quickly overtook the other two in terms of my level of interest because it tended to combine the hard-nosed aspects of the science subjects; everything within psychology is rigorously tested and seeks to be proven, with some of the more creative aspects that the social sciences offered.
Thinking of how we can apply the results to real life social challenges, or people challenges. I liked its breadth, I liked the fact that there were definitive answers, and I think everyone is an amateur psychologist-- but I just saw this was a chance to professionalize that and to pursue that as my career.
I did that as my A-level, and then chose it for my degree subject. I read experimental psychology at Oxford where the emphasis was very much upon the science aspects of psychology, so it's a lot of doing neurological studies. There was one particular study where our team needed to train some rats to run around a maze to reach some food at the end. Now, I knew it was coming at the end of this module so I didn't choose this module, but my poor colleagues named their rats, nurtured them, trained them to run mazes for about two months, and then unfortunately had to kill them and dissect their brains to see the neural pathways that had formed after their adventuring days were over.
Experimental psychology was interesting, but I thought what I really then wanted to do was to try to have a practical impact on the world as soon as possible. So that informed my choice into business psychology, because I saw that as the fastest route to having real, applied, tangible outcomes.
Q: What inspires you today about business psychology?
A: My main inspiration comes down to coming up with ever more effective and energizing assessment methods. I think the movement to make assessments more engaging is something that really resonates with me. And doing things that are perhaps slightly different.
We worked with a bank recently to develop some role play exercises where rather than just inviting people in cold and asking them to act out a scenario in order to assess them, we sent them a model of coaching in advance for them to learn and that they could then practice when they came in face to face. The nice thing about that was that not only did it allow us to assess their ability to coach and to learn, but even for those people that weren't successful they walked away with a new life skill that they could add to their CV and make them even more employable elsewhere. So it was really good for the brand of the bank as well.
What inspires me is being given free rein to think creatively about how the assessments can become more effective and more engaging.
Q: What do you aim to teach attendees when you give a talk?
A: It depends on the audience. Let me give you a selection of the audiences that I've spoken to.
At the most complex end I've recently presented at the Association of Business Psychologists, and that was on the topic of unconscious bias in selection processes. With this audience you're dealing with a highly educated, dedicated group who really want to know what's happening at the cutting edge. In these instances, I make sure from an academic and research perspective I have the latest trends, and the aim is to leave them feeling more informed than when they came to allow them to practice as psychologists even more effectively.
If we think about audiences who are coming to these topics anew, then what I seek to do is to try and demystify some of these topics that can appear quite difficult to grasp at first. For example, if we take the unconscious bias, at a recent talk I did for an audience of people who are coming across this for the first time, I was asking them to consider the concept of the fact that we tend to make judgments about people quite quickly based upon visual appearance.
Then, part way through my introduction I started to ask people: "Is it getting hot in here?" And I started loosening my tie. Then started unbuttoning my shirt, taking off my jacket. Underneath I was wearing a rock band t-shirt, I think it was Black Sabbath, and I continued to finish off with my introduction.
At the end I asked the delegates, who were at that point quite amused, to reflect upon my change in visual appearance had affected my credibility as a presenter, about how their initial perception of me was altered, and a number of people came up to me afterwards and said that was a really effective illustration of what unconscious bias means, because they said: "When I saw you in the Black Sabbath T-shirt I was thinking far less positively about what you were saying, even if the content was the same as when you came on in your shirt initially." So I try to bring to life what can be quite complex concepts through humor and through simple examples.
Q: That's a wonderful example and a very creative way to engage the audience.
A: It took a bit of bravery, but luckily it went down well.
Q: What's one piece of advice you have about public speaking that you could offer other public speakers?
A: I don't know if this is particularly earth shattering advice, but I guess my approach to public speaking is to get the content buttoned down first. I would go through producing a set of slides. I went in to speak at Cass Business School this week, and at the end of Friday last week I had a really good set of content slides about what is the future of assessment in the UK.
However, I didn't have anything that was going to engage them necessarily, or any fun games and icebreakers, so then I went through the agenda, section by section, and thought “Right, there's the content, but how can I make that more engaging? What alternatives are there?” And thinking quite broadly about that.
My own personal preference is to get the content buttoned down, and then go back and be quite diligent in challenging yourself to think “How can I make this more engaging for the audience?” Even when you might be breathing that sigh of relief that you've got the content finished, because I think that's how you make it properly resonate and stick with people.
Q: That's wonderful advice, thank you. What excites you most about the trends in business psychology for 2016?
A: This is a good question, because this is something that I was presenting on at the Cass Business School. I think there are two trend that are very interesting.
One of them is the emergence of game-based assessment, and when I'm talking about games I'm talking about computer games. There are a number of firms now who are developing quite rigorous ways of looking at psychological characteristics, such as people's tendency to take risks, or people's working memory. They will do this via the medium of a game that you might do on your mobile phone or tablet. I think it's interesting because it's something that is likely to be very engaging for a certain set of job seekers, so it's in particular a lot of companies that recruit apprentices are quite keen in finding out about these.
It represents a step forward in that it's much harder to prepare for how to do well at a game, than it might be to prepare for, let's say a verbal reasoning test or a numerical reasoning test. There are certain ways that you can increase your score quite quickly in terms of practice materials, whereas a game seeks to measure your ways of thinking and behaving at a more fundamental level. That's quite exciting!
If we're talking 2016 and beyond, the use of biometric monitoring. So, taking into account how people are responding physiologically at the same time as observing their behavior and personality preferences I think is an interesting trend, also potentially quite a worrying one.
I know there are a couple of organizations at the moment, one firm that works in the financial services sector, that actually wires its job applicants up to a physiological monitoring machine and watches how they react when exposed to stressful situations. For example in a trading simulation. So their galvanic skin response, their heart rate, things like that. So I think, I guess that's another way that organizations might be seeking to cut through applicant's ability to fake their answers or fake their responses and to find out on a neurological basis what's really going on.
But I think there's a big challenge there in trying to get candidates to accept that and also branding for the organization. If this is what it's like when I'm being recruited for this company, what's it going to be like when I work there? It can be quite scary.
Q: What are your aspirations as a speaker for the next year?
A: Well I see speaking as firstly a very enjoyable activity, something that gives me a lot of pleasure, but I think also it's a very important commercial activity because it allows me a platform from which I can build my credibility as an occupational psychologist, but also build the credibility of my firm.
So over the course of the next year that I'm down to speak at a couple of industry conferences, but also I think I would like to be able to speak at some more niche events. For example we've done a lot of work recently in the social work arena, so perhaps approaching some professional bodies where they're outside the world of HR, outside the world of occupational psychology, and trying to spread the good news about the power of psychometrics and assessment to a completely new audience.
I think that's quite exciting, and I think it will bring with it its challenges because it will be a completely new audience and really, I think you can less predict what kind of questions might arise. But that's something that would really, really appeal to me over the coming year.
Q: Thanks so much for both coming on the show today and sharing your insights about business psychology and about being a speaker. It was really interesting, so thanks.
A: Great, thank you very much.
A bit about our speaker:
Ben Williams is a Chartered Psychologist, Registered Occupational Psychologist with the Health Professionals Council and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He is passionate about using psychology to unlock new ways of working together. His expertise in unconscious bias, psychometrics, and assessment provides a blend of scientific rigour with commercial pragmatism.
Ben speaks about advancements and trends in business psychology, unconscious bias and how to effectively use psychometrics to gain meaningful insights for your organization.
Would you like to find out more about Ben William’s work, or hire him to speak at your next event? Here are some links you might find helpful.
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