"Outside-In" Job Quality Analytics

Applying advanced analytics to new sources of data to model job quality and organizational performance.

Job Quality Crisis

Despite record-low unemployment there is a job quality crisis in the US.

Most employees, 53%, say they have experienced financial stress.  And more than a quarter of them, 28%, say it has impacted their health.  

And the vast majority of employees, 77%, are not fully engaged with their work.  Less than half believe someone cares about them as a person at work.

The Performance Opportunity

Too many Americans lack “good jobs” despite abundant research suggesting that it’s in organizations’ own self-interest to create robust employment value propositions and to build productive work cultures.

As work becomes more knowledge-based and dependent on horizontal collaboration, rather than top-down command and control, it’s the organizations that can attract and retain talent that are outperforming their peers.

Why, then, doesn’t organizational self-interest lead to more high-quality jobs and more productive work-environments?

We think that one of the main reasons is that it’s hard to measure the “soft” stuff.  Organizations (and investors) struggle to measure culture and talent quality or link them to performance outcomes.  And that what’s what, we believe, leads to systematic under-investment.

Bringing Transparency to the Market

We see an new opportunity to address this gap: there is a wealth of new public data available— from message boards, careers sites, social media—that allow us to start to get an “outside- in” view of these critical performance factors. 

What this means is that we can start to put some “hard” edges around the quality of culture and talent at organizations and model their impact on performance.

And that is the reason we founded Spring Pond Partners: to help organizations and investors measure, benchmark and monitor the impact that culture and talent have on performance.

Our mission is to bring more transparency to the market in order to help investors, organizations, and, ultimately, employees. 

By applying advanced analytics to new sources of (structured and unstructured) data, we can create an "outside-in" view of job quality and work culture that is unique.  This allows us to look across companies and to connect the dots between quality and performance. 

We believe that measurement is an under-appreciated root cause challenge preventing job quality improvement. We can combine unique capabilities in addressing it: (1) cutting-edge analytics, (2) public data, (3) decades of experience modeling "soft" factors and performance.

Our approach is grounded in cutting-edge analytics.  We are automating the collection, cleansing and normalization data. We are also using advanced tools (including machine learning) to link job-quality-related factors to organizational performance outcomes. 

Technology is also critical for delivery.  We plan to automate report creation; and build an online delivery platform for those reports. We also will offer the data via an api.

-Investor use case:  To enlist 30 paying investors to use our indicators and reports as part of their ESG screening criteria. And for at least a third of them to actively engage management of companies on a job-quality related issue.

-Corporate use case: Pilot saas portal for companies  to monitor their own job quality.

We want to become the gold-standard for job quality evaluation. Specifically, we see a future where more 80% of large institutional investors are using our data, as is the vast majority of the F1000.  The more that it becomes a widely accepted standard, on both sides of the market (issuers and investors), the more traction and impact that we will have. 

We are deploying a SAAS solution, supported by a client success team.  Our client portal will house all of our data and reports.  We will also offer the underlying data/benchmarks via api and csv.  

We are deploying a subscription-based revenue model, with client success responsible for service and retention.  Over time, we will develop a dedicated sales channel, responsible for new client acquisition.

Having completed dozens of exploratory interviews, we are launching initially with investors who have an interest in social/impact investing. Specifically, we are targeting portfolio managers at long-only funds who invest in US public equities and are focused on integrating "esg criteria" into their investment decisions. They will use our product to (1) make decisions to buy/sell companies who are creating good jobs, and (2) advocate directly with issuers for addressing job-quality related issues.

In the next year we plan to enlist 30 paying investors to use our indicators and reports as part of their ESG screening criteria (which will impact >1,000 companies, and hundreds of thousands of employees).  In three years, we aim to enlist at least 300 investors as well as 500 companies using it directly themselves.  We expect to see companies improve job quality and as a result: -fewer employees reporting financial stress, -more employees reporting high levels of engagement, and -better Diversity & inclusion metrics.

We have decades of experience scaling information and software businesses. We have deep expertise in analytics especially related to evaluating organizational performance. 

We are combing domain expertise in data science, hr/talent consulting, and finance/investment management.

We are deploying a subscription-based revenue model.  We are building a scalable data asset, that grows in value with more users (as it becomes a standard), and solves a critical pain point for investors and organizations.

Solve would help us scale our solution. MIT is a thought leader in the job quality space (e.g., I'm a big fan of Zeynep Ton's work).  We would also benefit from the mentorship and connections that the program would offer. I'm especially interested making connections with entrepreneurs on the cutting edge of data science and analytics. Finally, because we have been bootstrapping this project to date, the funding would be material for us.

Two key barriers we face are building awareness of our solution and getting warm introductions into potential partners. I think that exposure through the program as well as the opportunity to make connections with peers and organizations would be very helpful.