We can do better than "fine"

When you start a new company, people want to know ‘why?’…

What motivates an apparently sane middle aged man to try and create something from nothing? Why bother? Why not just get a proper job?!

(And, trust me, there have been times since we started… usually at 3am in the morning… when these are questions I’ve asked myself!)

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My nemesis Simon Sinek eloquently encourages us all to ‘start with why’. So let me try and explain my personal ‘why’ for Youda…

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So I’m a pretty convinced atheist. I think most of us have got 50, maybe 60 years of useful, adult life and then they’re going to put us in a box.

I’m not expecting much to happen after they put me in the box.

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Now whether you agree with me or not about the afterlife, what's pretty indisputable is that you’re going to spend about a third of your life asleep. So that’s two decades you can’t do much with.

And for most people, the next biggest investment of their time (by quite some way), will be their work.

The average person will spend something like 115,000 hours of their life at work.

That’s a big big chunk of your life.

It’s almost certainly more time than you’ll spend with your family, friends, travelling or pursuing your hobbies and interests.

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For some people work’s terrible. It makes them depressed, burns them out or makes them physically or mentally unwell.

For a lucky minority, work’s a really great experience.

But if you stopped someone in the street or asked one of your friends “how’s work?” then my guess is that they’ll probably tell you “yeah, it’s fine”.

For most people, work’s a reasonably mediocre experience.

And I think 115,000 hours of “mediocre” is not a good use of your life.

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I’m not a naive utopian. I don’t think you can wave a magic wand and suddenly everyone’s going to be skipping into work every day happy as Larry.

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But I do think there’s enough scientific research to suggest we can make work a better experience for people and in doing so, we can also make our companies perform better and become more successful and sustainable

So how do we translate these good intentions into reality?

Well I think the key to unlocking this challenge is data.

People Teams need the data that tells them which people management tactics or experiences work for whom, when and why.

And critically, they need to know the ROI.

Because if you can prove that a specific initiative improves the employee experience and delivers a business benefit… you can keep investing in it.

And that’s our mission at Youda. We want to use AI to improve the experience of front line hospitality workers and generate the data that allows businesses to understand the value this creates for them.

If you’re interested in finding out more, please book your demo call with me now.