The Bloomberg group has shown that using ChatGPT in a recruitment process replicates certain prejudices at work in society. Fictitious CVs were submitted to the AI, with names selected in such a way as to evoke diverse ethnic backgrounds.

The findings are clear: given the same experience and skills, AI favors certain genders and ethnic backgrounds in selecting candidates. For instance, in the United States, ChatGPT clearly privileges people identified as “Hispanic women” for HR specialist positions, “Asian women” for financial analyst positions, and “white women” for software engineer positions. The disadvantaged groups are respectively those identified as “white men”, “black men” and “black women”. And the more the AI is asked to repeat the exercise, the more this bias is amplified.

To decide on the tasks we want to entrust to them, we should keep in mind how generative AIs work. They provide the most statistically relevant answers to the questions submitted. By construction, they therefore tend toward an average of the considerable volumes of information injected into them. Mechanically, if we inject prejudices, these same prejudices will emerge from their recommendations. It is up to us to spot and counter them.

Source: OpenAI’s GPT Is a Recruiter’s Dream Tool. Tests Show There’s Racial Bias, Leon Yin, Davey Alba, Leonardo Nicoletti, Bloomberg Technology + Equality, March 2024.

In the corporate world, a majority of employees regret that meetings are too numerous, too long and insufficiently effective. Despite these criticisms, the problem persists. To find possible solutions to this thorny issue, a team of academics studied 76 companies with over 1,000 employees who had banned meetings for 1 to 5 days a week.

Their findings invite a thorough reconsideration of our work habits: the more the number of meetings diminishes, the more we observe an increase in autonomy, communication, engagement and satisfaction. The tendency toward micro-management decreases, as do stress levels. Productivity improves. Paradoxically, reducing the number of meetings even has a positive effect on collaboration! According to the indicators used by the researchers to assess the level of cooperation, it increased by 55% with the 3 days without meetings formula. The employees found other ways of coordinating and exchanging ideas, better suited to their needs.

Does this mean that meetings should be abolished altogether? Let us not go too far. Beyond 3 weekly days without a meeting, satisfaction, productivity, engagement and cooperation begin to decline. Up to you to find the right balance!

Source: The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days, Benjamin Laker, Vijay Pereira, Pawan Budhwar, Ashish Malik, MIT Sloan Management Review, January 2022.

Trust is an essential ingredient in the performance of any organization. And yet, it remains something of a mystery: why is it so slow to build, so easily eroded? A detour through neuroscience allows a better understanding of the ways in which it is built.

Paul Zak has studied the mechanics of trust over time. He observes that, unlike other species, our brains make us naturally inclined to collaborate with people from outside our immediate circle—but that certain behaviors can hinder this disposition toward trust.

Trust is underpinned by two of our brains’ characteristics. First, a highly developed cortex that enables abstraction, analysis and planning. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and decide if we can trust them. Next, a capacity for empathy, which helps us share the emotions of others and decipher their motivations based on subtle clues. It emerges from the study that, in the corporate world, the behaviors most destructive of trust are the constant fear of doing the wrong thing (“No matter what I do, I’ll be upbraided”) and domineering behavior.

Findings that should be explored in greater depth to boost trust within your organization.

Source: How Our Brains Decide When to Trust, Paul J. Zak, Harvard Business Review, July 2019.

Generative AI is able to produce dozens of ideas in response to a problem in the blink of an eye. While the potential capacity to enhance our creativity may appear considerable, the results of early experiments are more tempered.

A study conducted by Stanford University and the consulting firm GeoLab shows that we still have some way to go. The researchers asked several teams to generate solutions to a real-life problem by drawing on a pool of data. The time allotted was 90 minutes; only some part of the teams had access to ChatGPT. The generated ideas were then graded from A (very convincing) to D (of no interest) by the concerned company’s decision-makers.

Surprisingly, the use of generative AI only very marginally increased the number of ideas generated (+8%). Although it did help reduce the number of bad ideas (–7%), it also slightly diminished the number of excellent ideas (–2%). Indeed, generative AI tools are designed to deliver the most statistically probable answers. They therefore tend towards the average, rather than towards truly innovative ideas.

It is therefore best to start with a reflection process that is not influenced by AI-generated ideas. AI then excels at helping to iteratively improve these ideas. Learning to interact with AI to deepen your ideas will thus become a key competency.

Source: Don’t Let Gen AI Limit Your Team’s Creativity, Harvard Business Review, March-April 2024.

The most innovative teams are the ones whose members do not hesitate to bring up problems, suggest ideas that are not likely to meet universal support, and challenge one another. But how can such freedom of expression be encouraged?

Psychological safety is one essential condition. People need to be able to deviate from the prevalent way of thinking without being immediately criticized or ostracized, and be able to share their difficulties transparently.

Another condition is equally crucial: intellectual honesty. If the team members are not totally honest about their analysis of the problem and if they do not emulate each other to raise the relevant level of expectations, innovation can stagnate.

The challenge is thus to combine these high standards with a feeling of psychological safety. Jeff Wilke, the former head of Amazon’s retail division, retold his lengthy debates with CEO Jeff Bezos over the launch of the Kindle e-reader. Wilke feared disappointing his customers, as Amazon lacked any experience in producing consumer electronics. Bezos believed that Amazon needed to seek to expand its skillset. This divergence enabled them to revisit the project and to significantly improve it. The key to this success? Having managed to put egos behind adherence to a common goal.

Source: Why Innovation Depends on Intellectual Honesty, Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, Curtis Lefrandt, Taeya Howell, MIT Sloan Management Review, January 2023.