#StartupsEverywhere profile: Ben Waber, Co-Founder and President, Humanyze
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Using Analytics to Improve the Future of Work
Humanyze, a Boston-based analytics startup that developed out of the MIT Media Lab in 2011, is helping companies across the world gain a better understanding of their organizational health. With a privacy-first focus, the startup uses anonymized and aggregated enterprise data to help firms measure and comprehend how work gets done across their teams. We recently spoke with Ben Waber—Humanyze’s co-founder and president—to learn a little more about the startup’s work, goals, and policy concerns.
Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background?
I started my PhD at the MIT Media Lab originally intending to use wearable sensors to study collaboration patterns in a laboratory setting. Salary negotiations, student social networks, etc. This built on my undergraduate work in computer vision, where I used video analysis to build interfaces for people with disabilities. In a similar way, by analyzing data from different sensors it’s possible to understand and predict outcomes in a wide variety of circumstances.
My research group (Prof. Sandy Pentland, Taemie Kim, and Daniel Olguin) was approached by a professor from Sloan, the business school at MIT, who was studying collaboration patterns and organizational outcomes at a large German bank. He thought by combining our sensor data with email and survey data that he was already collecting that we could gain real insight into what drove performance and job satisfaction at work.
This meant deploying data collection technology in a real world setting for weeks at a time, which had never been done before. But it sounded interesting, so we went through with the study. The results were extremely compelling, ultimately leading the bank’s executives to reorganize the entire company and physical workplace based on our analysis. During our PhDs we would go to more and more companies to understand different aspects of work, eventually leading us to spin out the company.
Tell us more about Humanyze. What is the work that you’re doing, and how are you using organizational network analysis to help businesses measure how their work gets done?
Humanyze is an analytics company that looks at existing corporate data to measure and understand organizational health. We connect with data that companies already have about how work gets done—think email, chat, meeting data, and in office sensor data—to provide macro-level organizational health metrics to large enterprises all over the world. All of this is done with privacy in mind, no insights are given on individual employees, and we do not look at or analyze content.
It is important for companies to understand their organization’s health in order to answer specific questions related to the impact that the workplace, HR decisions, and digital transformation initiatives are having on employees. Based on decades of research, we found that organizational health is better understood by looking at the engagement, team level productivity, and organizational adaptability at a company. Here are some of the many ways we have helped companies:
An energy company saw a five percent increase in productivity by leveraging our insights to improve communication and collaboration across teams;
We helped a pharmaceutical company understand the collaboration patterns that highly rated and top performing managers had in order to inform best managerial practices and programming around leadership training;
Informed the workplace design of a large multinational technology firm that helped improve sales performance and collaboration across multiple siloed teams.
Many of these insights come straight from organizational network analysis (ONA). ONA has been developed over decades of academic and field research. These networks represent how information flows in companies, illustrating bottlenecks, silos, and exploratory networks necessary for project completion, idea generation, and the overall functioning of any organization. Understanding these patterns is essential to effectively run a business, if you can continually understand the overall health of your organization you can quickly adjust when things start to go array and you can plan for major initiatives or changes in company strategy.
I know a major priority for your firm is to protect personal data. Can you tell us about the steps you’re taking to protect consumers’ data privacy?
We don’t receive any consumer data, and all the enterprise data we receive is anonymized and aggregated. No metrics at the individual level are ever provided. We don’t have any access to email addresses, names, and the like, and we go above and beyond GDPR in terms of how we handle enterprise data.
What makes Boston’s startup ecosystem so unique?
We have deep academic roots here, so people tend to build technologies that are backed up by science and have a real impact. It’s also helpful that not everyone in the Boston area is working on tech. Bumping into people with different experiences and problem sets makes a real difference in terms of solutions you build.
What are some of the startup-related policy concerns that you believe should receive more attention from state and federal lawmakers?
Immigration law is extremely outdated and needs to be liberalized. Immigrants from all backgrounds and experience levels are essential to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and making the visa application process simpler, more affordable, and more reasonable and fair are critical to the long term health of our economy.
The tax code is also an issue. Tax codes currently favor large, entrenched businesses to the detriment of small businesses and startups alike. Taxing based on revenue and scale is a much fairer approach and would help the faster growing, smaller companies that drive the majority of job growth in this country grow more effectively.
What is your goal for Humanyze moving forward?
We can point today to hundreds of thousands of people who measurably like their jobs better, make more money, and their companies make more money because of our technology. I want to continue to expand that, proving that when companies invest in the employee experience it has real measurable ROI.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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