MTN’s new Organisational Performance Lead
MTN is pleased to announce the promotion of Zsófia Belovai to Behavioural Science Lead for our Organisational Performance practice. With this interview, we reflect on her time at MoreThanNow, the great experiments she has done so far and which parts of organisational culture she wants to improve next.
“I am committed to getting more of our work into academic journals because it’s a big opportunity. I have always felt that the work we do at MTN is so valuable”
- Zsófia Belovai, Organisational Performance Lead
Q: You’ve been with MTN for a couple years now, could you tell me about some of the work you have done, specifically your experiments?
Zsofi: So far, I have run 11 randomised control trials with MTN and our partners. They’ve all been scientifically robust, which is something I am very proud of. This means they are all up to the academic standard of being publishable in a journal. This was one of the reasons why we started our academic collaborations, so we could harness the potential of the research we do at MTN. By publishing with those academics, we put our findings into the world, and in this way, other people can build on this and use them.
To this day one of my proudest experiments has been on Psychological Safety. It was the first experiment which I have run that’s getting submitted to an academic journal, and has already been presented at academic conferences. The design is reusable for future projects and it’s arguably one of the first academic experiments on the concept of Psychological Safety, so that’s really exciting. I am committed to getting more of our work into academic journals because it’s a big opportunity. I have always felt that the work we do at MTN is so valuable and I am very honoured to have the chance to actually involve big researchers in our work and help them publish as well.
Q: That is exciting. And a congratulations are in order, as you are setting up and running three new labs. Could you tell me more about them?
Z: Firstly, there's the Psychological Safety Lab, which we run with Prof. Amy Edmondson. She was the one who coined the term, so I am still quite starstruck to be working with her. To this day we've also worked with two other academics in this lab; Maria Guadalupe and Florian Englmaier, who were instrumental in getting the first Psychological Safety study out. We've got three more experiments lined up for the next couple of quarters, which is very exciting. We’re hoping to conduct many more trials and produce some great research together with Amy.
Secondly, we have the Reskilling Lab where we work with two Academics from Harvard, Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo. In this we explore how reskilling happens in a digital world. We're evaluating some exciting programmes in one of the projects, focusing on how we can decrease the impact of medical waste and fake medicine in sub-Saharan Africa, which is a very important prosocial project.
Finally, something that is launching now is the Squiggly Careers collaboration, which is a slightly different format than the other labs but equally promising. We get to work with AmazingIf, i.e. Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper to test what they have worked on over the last couple of years. They have a lot of great content that people absolutely love. Over the next couple of months we will have the chance to evaluate it with a couple of big partners across different industries.
Q: Is there any topic or area in organisational culture that you’d like to explore next?
Z: A big dream of mine has always been to do an onboarding project. I think it's a very sensitive part of organisational culture. It's a make-or-break moment for a lot of people, from graduate schemes to mid-career new joiners, and even at higher levels. Within the Psychological Safety Lab we're hoping to explore this with one of our partners, specifically to see how Psych Safety develops among new joiners. In general, I am interested in running a couple of RCTs to see what those methodologies are and where we can really get people on board as quickly as possible, even in a hybrid world, and make them feel included as efficiently as possible.
We’re very excited to have Zsofi in charge of this Organisational Performance practice, where we work on testing interventions to improve the workplace. We are looking for new organisations who want to join and take a more robust approach to culture. Read more about all our labs below.