Keeping people motivated is one of the hardest things about being a manager — which is why companies are paying a Japanese startup thousands of dollars to help them do it.
The Tokyo-based startup Attuned offers companies what it calls "predictive HR analytics" that can identify the intrinsic motivations of each member of a team. By having employees take a simple 55-question survey, Attuned says it can reveal who within a company is motivated by money, who thrives on competition, who requires a flashy job title to be happy, and more.
Attuned's American-born CEO Casey Wahl said the startup spent more than two years working with a team of psychologists to write the perfect set of questions — ones that not only yielded a strong link to specific values, but also wouldn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes to complete.
Wahl invited me to take the survey, so last week I took him up on the offer. Although I was bewildered by some of the questions, I managed to make it through, and learn something about myself in the process. And I left understanding why major Japanese companies like Rakuten and Denso are shelling out so much money to have their employees do the same.
Here's what the experience was like: