KAKEAI

The COVID-19 pandemic is becoming the accelerator for one of the most significant workplace transformations of our lifetime. The biggest crisis of the digital era has indeed brought with it a lot of extraordinary circumstances, such as social distancing and remote work that have created a seismic shift in the traditional, in-office management paradigm. Once business leaders had the opportunity to brainstorm and research with their team members in person and understand the state of affairs in the office space, they are now confined to the limits of online meetings with limited on-site presence.

Amid these sweeping changes in the way organizations operate and how individuals work, people management is becoming crucial for achieving results. Managers can no longer notice simple changes in their employees because they do not work together simultaneously and space in a commonplace: the office. On the other hand, work has become more integrated into people’s lives, with no restrictions on work attendance. In other words, even if HR visualizes data, analyzes it, and implements measures, the employees of the target organization are at home facing their computers. Nevertheless, the traditional roles of HR, such as talent management and understanding the actual situation through organizational engagement surveys, remain unchanged. At this critical time, if organizations do not support individual employees to achieve results, it will directly impact their performance and the company’s success as a whole.

So, how can leaders adapt to today’s challenges and motivate each individual to work better?

As HR Tech continues to evolve while expanding its scope as “Work Tech,” KAKEAI has supported people management with technology as a people success platform. The company is committed to reducing the burden on individual managers and employees and maximizing the effectiveness of human connections and the benefits that can be gained from them while working with digital tools. With an unwavering commitment, KAKEAI continues to evolve toward helping every worker reach their potential. This progressive school of thought perfectly aligns with the company’s mission—“No matter where you are, No matter who you interact with, Your life’s potential shall never be suppressed.”

Enhancing Employee Performance during the Pandemic

In line with its mission and vision, KAKEAI is singularly focused on advancing people management, which depends on the experience and feelings of individual managers and mentors. “Many of our clients are challenged with extracting the power of individual employees and promoting continuous growth of their companies in the face of pressure to digitize and shift business domains. Individual managers are required to understand the current status of their employees and smoothly resolve any issues that those employees may have,” explains Honda Hidetaka, CEO of KAKEAI. In addition, as the ways of working, earning, and building careers become more diverse, managers are required to integrate the direction of their organization and the direction of individual employees to encourage employees to exert their abilities in their current jobs. The 1-on-1 meeting, a one-on-one dialogue between the manager and the employee, is the last mile of the strategy. KAKEAI focuses on making that dialogue possible without physical or mental strain and improving the quality of that dialogue.

The uniqueness of KAKEAI stems from its ability to help employees and managers to interact effectively with each other with minimal preparation. KAKEAI also provides managers with tips on how to interact effectively with employees. Managers are also fragmented in WFH, making it difficult for them to exchange information, and the responses managers need in today’s work environment are changing. They are expected to respond to individual employees according to their situation and current capabilities and interact with them appropriately while considering their future expectations. On the other hand, from the employee’s point of view, performance tends to be influenced by the relationship with the current boss, but it becomes easier to build a working relationship in steps with the intervention of a system. “By providing the necessary and sufficient data to solve the organizational issues of management and HR departments, we are able to grasp the actual business operations and thoroughly address the issues of the managers and employees who are the daily users of our services.This is embodied in the form of preparation and implementation screens for 1-on-1 meetings,” says Hidetaka. The company is researching how to collect knowledge on people management, 1-on-1 meetings, and other ways to engage managers at the right time and provide it to managers when they need it.

By providing the necessary and sufficient data to solve the organizational issues of management and HR departments, we are able to grasp the actual business operations and thoroughly address the issues of the managers and employees who are the daily users of our services

At the core of KAKEAI’s solutions is a unique technology, an algorithm that captures the differences between people based on brain science and suggests ways to interact with them based on these differences. By combining this core technology with a unique mechanism, KAKEAI uses data to solve the root cause of the impersonal nature of people management. “What kind of supervisor? What kind of subordinates? Under what circumstances and how they interact? How subordinates feel about it?

We have made it possible for managers around the world to have access to the best management knowledge at their fingertips, tailored to their own people and situations. All of these are patented,” Hidetaka comments. In addition, based on the accumulation of data, KAKEAI further improves the accuracy of providing managers with suggestions based on global trends.

The company has also completed integration with Microsoft Office 365 accounts, Teams, Google Workplace accounts, and Slack, focusing on creating an environment where individual workers can use KAKEAI seamlessly in the flow of their work.

A Novel Approach to Increasing Engagement

With its innovative technology, KAKEAI has helped many organizations achieve their engagement and productivity goals. For example, one such company uses KAKEAI to hold 1-on-1 meetings with local employees in Tokyo, New York, London, Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong to increase engagement. As a result, in a work-from-home environment, where loyalty to the organization is expected to be low, turnover is declining. In addition, in comparison with the sales department, the turnover rate is decreasing.

Due to the impact of COVID-19, it has become necessary to deploy people management concepts and methods in companies that are being forced to expand from manufacturing to solutions business. However, it is not easy to change the people management methods companies have been exposed to. In addition, as they embrace employees with characteristics and expertise that were not present in the existing organization in the current environment, they need people management that is more responsive to diversity. “We have been doing this since 2020, and from now on, we will ask and support all existing managers to implement ‘appropriate ways to interact with the current business operating environment and current members,’” notes Hidetaka.

All Eyes on a Promising Future

KAKEAI will strengthen its efforts to continuously improve the quality of its individual dialogues and link them to individual growth and the continuous creation of organizational results. To engage both managers and employees toward the common goal of personal growth and corporate results, the company will improve those one-on-one relationships while also creating connections with other managers, employees, and others outside the organization. Hidetaka mentions, “Interacting with others will reaffirm the value of the present and provide you with hints for your own creativity. We will expand the platform to include knowledge from outside the company in the world of KAKEAI so that we can bring those hints back to our daily work.”

The English version of KAKEAI is already available worldwide, and the company will expand the platform so that individuals from August 2021 can use it. The concept is to “meet, connect, and evolve together with colleagues outside the company. Individuals who share KAKEAI’s mission or who have a need to evolve themselves and contribute to the world by getting involved with others will be able to enter the world of KAKEAI,” Hidetaka says. KAKEAI aims to connect as many managers and employees as possible who think, ‘Can’t I make things a little better now?’ and create new value and movement from that.

Due to the WFH environment, the company plans to update its dashboard so that management and HR can accurately grasp the current situation. To help organizations achieve results, KAKEAI will expand the functions for management and HR to take the most appropriate measures. “Recently, I have also come to believe that in order to increase engagement and employees, it is effective to create opportunities for dialogue not only with their direct supervisors, but also with managers in neighboring departments and even higher-level positions. In addition, I believe that daring to connect with people outside of the company may actually have a great return,” expresses Hidetaka.

KAKEAI is already being used outside of Japan and has bagged numerous awards and recognition quickly. KAKEAI has been selected as one of the top 30 global HR tech startups (from the HR Technology Conference, one of the world’s most significant HR tech events) and one of the top 10 HR tech services in the Asia Pacific for 2019 and 2020. The company has also won the Silver Award at HRM Asia Readers Choice 2020, one of the largest HR awards in Asia.