My guest is Brad Smith, the chief science officer at meQuilibrium. Their software helps users better understand why they’re stressed and how they can be successful, and helps employers understand how they can support them. How does AI help with that? What do employees think? We’ll talk about that and a lot more, on this edition of PeopleTech.
Transcript
Mark
Welcome to people tech, the podcast of WorkforceAI.News. I'm Mark Feffer. My guest today is Brad Smith, the Chief Science officer at mequilibrium, their software helps users better understand why they're stressed and how they can be successful. It also helps employers investing how they can support their workforce. How does AI help with? What do employees think? And we'll talk about that more on this edition of People tech. Hey, Brad. It's good to see you. Equilibrium. It's really about helping employers keep track of mental health their their workforce is mental health. Can you talk to me a? Bit about how data factors into that.
Brad
Yeah. So at multiple levels, data factors into how we care for people. And I I would revise your description in the slightest possible fashion by saying we help employers manage their workforce. But what we're also doing is helping individuals manage their mental health. So it's a, it's A2 level thing. So and and that actually. Foreshadows what what I would say about how data are used. On on the individual level, data are used to personalize. So we have a an assessment that employees take upfront. It's about 60 questions. It takes 5 minutes to do really quick. That assessment then feeds into an AI driven algorithm that creates A personalized user journey. So if you're really struggling in a specific area, say empathy or with stress management, or you're struggling with work life balance, you're going to get learning opportunities in your personalized user journey that are upfront relevant to your needs. And so if you look across a very large sample of users, hundreds of thousands literally no two of those journeys are going to be alike because of the assessment data that feeds into that personalization algorithm. The second way data is. Used or there's multiple ways, but at another level data are used at the population level, so we have a population resilience management tool that we call workforce intelligence and we can workforce intelligence basically allows not every manager in the organization but the folks who are generally sort of managing the niq. Relation. Managing that relationship to be able to look across organizations, see risks. So what's the depression risk? What's the anxiety risk? What are the various other risks that we see across the organization? And most companies provide us some eligibility file. That eligibility file allows us to segment and cut and slice and dice made us interested in what's happening in a specific business.
Mark
If you're.
Brad
You know. Or in a demographic group, or at a specific work site, you're able to actually drill down and see sort of one of the strengths of the folks that work in that area, as well as what are the challenges. So to recap, data use the individual level to drive that personalization algorithm at the population level to help manage and ultimately you can direct other interventions at the population. Level. So that's the two ways two key ways data are used in equilibrium.
Mark
So can you give me an example of how this would work and what it would lead to? What's the kind of issue? That a manager or an employer would be looking for and what would they do with the information?
Brad
Yeah. So given an opening, I'll give you 2 examples. 1 is that 1 is a sort of mental health example. Mental health is obviously important. We've we've sort of had a heightened appreciation for mental health since the dawn of COVID. And the rates of depression, anxiety like more than doubled. Employers face, especially those that are self insured, face pretty significant costs when their rate of mental health concerns goes up like that. So and and it's just the right thing to do to help employees take better care of their mental health. So it's not only a financial motive, but an employer could use me cue obviously on the individual level, it's working in the background to help people with the things they struggle with. Given the personalization that we talked about. Earlier, but we'd also be able to be an employer, would be able to drive what we call a campaign. So we have evidence based campaigns that help help with burnout with managing stress, a whole variety of topics that would be relevant to improving mental health. Those can be targeted either organization wide if it's something that's a concern. Across the whole organization or can be targeted sort of more narrowly. There's a business unit that's really struggling. The manufacturing operation is really struggling. So one sense of that make you might might be used is to sort of address mental health concerns another. Way that EQ equilibrium might be used is to address performance concerns, so we often talk about what we do is being at the intersection of well-being and performance. So the former example being a well-being example, the performance example being what's coming, and that example might be we talked to a lot of companies these days that are really struggling with change. Management, the aphorism that I've heard said, is that change has never been faster than it is now, and it will never be as slow as it is now in the future. So a lot of organizations are really struggling with change, and they're struggling with change. In large part because change is tough, right? People, people are averse to change naturally. Most people are averse to change. So what? What can we do? What can we recognize the characteristics that are supportive of being not change versus being change ready. Those are things like problem solving. They're like self-confidence. Their empathy for understanding what's happening in other folks lives, and if we can identify where those characteristics and others are lacking again, we could deploy a campaign. Or maybe you could work in the background to help boost problem solving skills to boost change management skills. So both at the well-being side as well as the the performance side data can be leveraged to help a company drive better results and a better bottom line.
Mark
Equilibrium existed before the current AI rush. How did AI impact your product and your services and your basic vision?
Brad
Yeah, so, so we we did exist before sort of the the big hit of generative AI. I would say we were AI before. AI was cool would be one way to say it at the very beginning we we we're what we're trying to really do is translate what was a paradigm that was one-on-one one of our founders. Is A is a pen psychologist, pen train University, Pennsylvania trained psychologists. He worked out a lot of the protocols and a lot of the assessment tools and education tools as part of his doctoral research that. 10 and then it was in the process of implementing that in a face to face seminar training, kind of mode, obviously not very scalable. If you have 20,000 workers, you could either have enough time or enough money to put 20,000 people through face to face training. And so the goal really was to help identify a way that we could scale. What we want to do, which is build resilience, build performance to scale that on to very large 2. You know even 200,000 employees. How can we scale it? And so we wanted to do it. So it was not a one-size-fits-all. So it wasn't just an LMS learning management system course you too. But it felt like the program knew you, and so we we took very, very seriously the implementing tools, AI tools that that are not generative AI but machine learning tools and other rules driven algorithms that in the early days help us build that personalization as technologies improved as computing. Capacity has improved. We've been able to take advantage of other things like recommendation engines, the kinds of things that you see at Amazon that seem to know what you bought last time and what you might like to buy. Sometimes they do a good job. They could do a better job than they they probably do, but we've been able to leverage machine learning to put recommendation algorithms in the product. We have a lead tracker. That we have recently built out with AI so it recognizes patterns. It's got a pattern recognition tool that can help you see if there are things going on in your life that on every Tuesday you seem to have a a difficult mood or in the mornings your moods tend to be lower. But then, most recently, we've been trying to harness the generative AI tools that have become widely available in a safe way. So machine learning tools, the rules driven algorithms, the things that we adopted early are very low risk. You know, if Amazon gives you a product that you think is comically not relevant. You just pass on and you you go to the next thing and in the case of generative AI, if you put in a topic about how to how to cope with family stress and you get served up a bunch of articles on on losing a child or on grief. That aren't relevant. That's that's a lot. Or the chat bot says back to you something that is that is inappropriate because it doesn't have the right guard rails around it. It's a lot more dangerous than getting the wrong article recommendation that you might see in the product. So we've been very careful, very circumspect in terms of. Implementing the generative AI tools in the product in a way that is very safe, probably under what the current technology would support, but we are given the the care that we're entrusted with by our customers. We've been very careful in terms of how we, how we do that.
Mark
One of the things I'm curious about is the whole idea of delivering help in the moment. Can you talk about that? I mean, that's become increasingly important to employers in the last couple of years doing things in the flow of work. In the moment, why is that? Important and how does AI help you with that?
Brad
Now it's important because if you missed the opportunity to to address a problem in its early stages or a concern in as early stages, then what likely happens in those cases is that it blossoms and and not in a positive way. It gets bigger, it consumes. More of your mental energy, so addressing it when someone is is ready. That's the other thing, right? Like in terms of readiness to change, theories about readiness to change when someone reaches out for help and it it indicates that they're ready to think about changing or changing the way they behave or the. They think we don't want to miss that opportunity because it's the key place where someone's ready to change. You want to take advantage of that and give them the tools that they need to do to change the way that they think or the way that they feel or way they believe. So that's sort of the background about why it's critical to act when someone is ready. We've done it in Q is first we leveraged A generative AI tools to build a set of responses and to prompts that people we attract people being concerned and interested in, we call it ask me. View it has a couple of different starting points. It has an I want to starting point has a I feel a starting point, so I want to could be is I want to stop feeling so anxious that I feel starting point might turn into a completion that's I feel stressed out. And so those are developed, those stems, those sort of prompts are developed from both from expert knowledge as well as what we've seen people. Type into the search engine over the years at BQ we want to do is leverage generative AI to build, to build sets of relevant content so that when someone comes, they can type in a phrase, it will be matched up with a phrase that we've already sort of vetted so that we don't have people typing in, and I want to hurt my boss. I want to hurt myself anything like that, and then we have identified relevant content using the generative AI tools. And then serve that up in sort of a curated way in the moment so that people get and the and the the resources we surface are not like take two weeks and work through this skill, but they're like, here's our breathing exercise that can help you reduce your stress right now. Take 40 breaths or use circle breathing or use 4. 74 breathe. So there's a variety of oriented around quick hits to help people address whatever concerns they might be. We've done a quick follow on now with ask Me, Keefer managers, managers face sort of a different set of concerns. And again given what we know about managers over over the history and what we've seen managers search for. Product that we've provided in a very similar approach and I want to or I need stem in what we call ask BQ for managers again completed with a variety of of phrases, things like I want to be better at having hard conversations and so again leveraging tools that we already have in product. The generate AI was used to match different kinds of activities and again quick hit focused things to help out managers that are struggling with something right there in the moment and they need a boost before they go into a difficult meeting or they need a boost in helping figure out how to get their team focused. Given a tough task that's ahead.
Mark
For thinking about the managers talks, how much knowledge do they need about these issues to to use the solution you know most managers that that I know anyway they they're specialists in the thing they manage. But may not be particularly, you know, expert in mental health or Wellness or anything like that. Do they need to? Be to get the most out of Nick Librium.
Brad
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that there's no expectation that anyone is a therapist or wants to become a therapist. We're never going to put anybody in that position, manager or someone else of having to take care of someone's problems. And so we do do mental health things. We will talk about how to. How to be less anxious, but we're never going to tell a manager if you have an employee that seems anxious, here's the five questions you need to ask. We're never going to give them a therapeutic guide to work through. We hope that the foundational things that you learn in equilibrium, so we always start off with prerequisite skills that help us understand, and we use evidence based. We'll start off with helping everybody understand manager or non manager or like helping them understand the connection between the way that we think those sentences that we say to ourselves and our heads. And the way that we feel and then ultimately the way that we behave, so all of that is important knowledge, but that's all taught in the product. We're not expecting any knowledge beyond that in terms of of what we we are doing for managers, the content in there, the prompts, it's really more about how to lead. How to mentor how to manage with resilience? And ways to lead your team in a way that's empathetic and less about solving mental health problems in your team. So there's really not a concern, I don't think a manager would need to be concerned about not having the right background or enough psychology classes to be able to use what we offer in there because it's really focused on. Being an effective leader on your team more than it is focused on mental health management.
Mark
And how do employees react to the whole idea of, you know, this, this system, this technology being involved in, in mental health?
Brad
Yeah. So great question. You you might expect, especially when you find out or you know that the data that you collect in the assessment then feeds up through the organization and that someone who's a higher up in HR or benefits or talent or somewhere does see that data. We're very clear in our terms and conditions up front that we're never going to share your individual data that it that is tied to your name or your employee ID. We're never going to share that with your boss. We're never going to share that with with any leader. Everything that we ship up to the top levels of organization is all aggregated. So you'll right know what's happening in accounting, but you won't know what's happening with Jane and accounting. We find that that typically solves the problem. There's all these people. Out there, who are going to be very suspicious, maybe they've been burned in. In the past, I think it's a very small minority. We have companies where we've enrolled 70% of employees in BQ and other companies where we have like 90% engagement among the enrolled population. So while it is a concern, I think that the privacy safeguards that we've put up around that, that are pretty clearly. Delineated and we also emphasize all these things when we launch to a population so that it's not just as known as you may you probably don't. I don't read all the terms and conditions that are on every website that we access. So we're also careful when we launch to a population to let people know very clearly and simple. Really that their data is always their data, it's always private and it's never going to be shared. That's been successful for us. Honestly, to this point.
Mark
Brad, thanks very much. I appreciate your your time today. It's great to talk to you and I hope. We'll do it again.
Brad
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Mark
My guest today is the Brad Smith, the Chief Science officer of meQuilibrium, and this has been people tech, the podcast of WorkforceAI.News. We're part of the work defined podcast network. Find them at www.wrkdefine.com. And to keep up with AI technology manager, subscribe to WorkforceAI today. We’re the most trusted source of news in the interim tech industry. Find us in www.workforceai.news. I’m Mark Feffer.
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