This blog is reserved for my personal musings, hobbies, interests, etc., and I have systematically avoided introducing anything of a “business” nature to it. But I will digress from that policy for a moment just to announce the launch of our new dedicated web site for Psychmentation™, my company’s flagship product, which I actually developed over the last 15 years.
In 1994 we were asked to uncover the reasons for massive employee turnover (35% per year) at one of our large pharma clients. Senior management believed that it was due to below industry-average wages, but nevertheless, wanted a thorough investigation of the reasons. We planned to interview a broad cross-section of employees but also recognized that it wouldn’t be an easy task since we surmised that most people would be hesitant to talk about their dissatisfaction with a bunch of strangers payed by their employer.
I decided to try something different, going back to my early clinical experiences and how we used to focus on building trust through a variety of methods geared to assure confidentiality and a zero-risk environment, where people could truly “open up” in comfort and safety. Its important to note here that this is not usually done in a commercial context; the methods of industrial psychologists draw little upon the experiences of their clinical brethren – a strange phenomenon of “silos” that develops from the moment one decides to take one path vs another in graduate school.
The rest, as they say, is history. We were stunned to discover that under the right circumstances, people would disclose their most intimate and heartfelt perceptions, including things that would have been inconceivable using traditional research methods. We took this early success and started applying it to more and more business cases where we felt that there might be disclosure barriers, continuously perfecting our methodology. We branded this “product”, Psychmentation™ and it has become our biggest and most succesful service. Have a look at the web site and associated blog here if you like.
