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Three doctors, one organizational psychology conference
71 Plays6 months ago
To wrap up season 2, the three of us met up in NYC to record the last episode of the season in-person and debrief a recent organizational psychology conference we all attended. We share the latest insights we uncovered on topics ranging from leader prototypes to AI coaching, dwelling on the sessions that resonated with us. If you're curious about what an I/O psychology conference looks and feels like, check out this episode!
Finally, we are taking a short break and will return in July with more content on all things Asian in the workplace!
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Transcript
Introduction of Dr. Echo Yu
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of Hidden in Plain Sight, your podcast for all things Asian in the workplace. I'm joined by my two co-host, Dr. Nguyen and Dr. Yu. There is a reason why I'm introducing my two partners in crime as doctors, and that's because Echo, or Dr. Yu, recently defended her dissertation and now is officially a doctor.
Dr. Yu's First PSYOP Conference
00:00:35
Speaker
How are you feeling, Dr. Yu? I'm feeling great. I can't be greater than this. And it's actually my first time attending PSY-UP as a doctor. So that's actually a nice segue to today's topic. We're going to be talking about PSY-UP and what's our experience in those conferences. Exactly. So you know how we talk about celebrating small and big wins on this podcast? So we wanted to practice what we preach and echo getting her
00:01:05
Speaker
or Dr. Yu getting her PhD was no small feat. That's a big milestone that we wanted to call out and celebrate.
Understanding PSYOP Conference
00:01:12
Speaker
Oh, all right, so PSYOP, we got to spell it out for our listeners, because I think a lot of our listeners might not know what PSYOP is. Yeah. Let me just say that was a great introduction, Dr. Kim. PSYOP is the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology. For us in the field, the social organizational field or industrial organizational field, that's our main annual conference that we go to. My colleagues still refer to as SIOP.
00:01:41
Speaker
And I keep telling them it's PSY-UP. S-I-O-P. Maybe that makes it sound more, I don't know, like more official? PSY-UP. I've actually never heard of that. PSY-OP. Yeah, for people who don't know PSY-UP, like they will always like just spell out the letters when they pronounce it, which I understand. And so it's interesting they hear from me saying PSY-UP and we're like, what is PSY-UP? Interesting. Maybe it's an I-O thing.
00:02:08
Speaker
So who are the people who attend SIOP? Is it mostly academics or practitioners? Great question. For me, I believe it's practitioners and academics who are in the field of IO psychology, come here to present their current work or learn from others who are actually doing the work. You may have some graduate students as well who are going into a master's program or PhD program or master's or PhD level students presenting their work with their co-authors.
00:02:38
Speaker
I think I actually also see some lawyers in there. Yeah. Cause especially when it comes to a personnel connection and like the employee law and privacy space, um, there are sessions that people inviting lawyers to come to this. Um, and I think that's the interesting part, uh, given like what's the mission for sign up, right? So I, I do find them being interesting topics and I myself,
00:03:07
Speaker
enjoying those like outside of field conversation. And it's a different perspective and different lens into how we should handle those. And also speaks to the importance of the work that we do, because this really touch upon how the auditions handle this in the service of not only does this have direct impact on the employee itself, but there is also a legal parameter into it.
Experiences at PSYOP: Isolation vs. Connection
00:03:34
Speaker
You know, out of all the conferences that I've been to, I think Syup is one of my favorite. And I think one of the reasons why it is one of my favorite conferences, if not my favorite, is because it feels very open. Like it's welcoming. There's always, you know, a session that there's so many sessions. So like you can go to any one of them, you know, we'll talk more about the format, which you can check out if you were to attend the conference. But like the appeal for me is just like,
00:04:02
Speaker
connecting with people who do similar work in different fields. What about you two? There's a different voice I wanted to share.
00:04:12
Speaker
This is going back to a few years where my teammates who come from a different background, like we really like everyone to go to sign up as we usually do. We feel we are very welcoming and we are very open to those boys. But the experience that I heard from iconic or I think at the time they were having more education.
00:04:35
Speaker
like a higher ed background instead of just IO psych. They were like, we think IO's are pretty isolated and pretty much to yourself and it's not that much of a different voice allowed versus
00:04:53
Speaker
they felt a little bit like enough doubt so that's my again like this is probably like one or two person's opinions who is outside of IO but I definitely say like I mean it's a side up conference right yeah it's more people like us so as an IO psychologist what do you think?
00:05:10
Speaker
I would say, you know, Jenny, when you say you compared it to other conferences, the other conferences I've been to are like SPSP for social psychology into a regional one, like Midwestern Psychological Association, AP, APS, we've been to APS together. And I would say, yeah, like, this is
00:05:30
Speaker
the funnest one, but I would also say that in the beginning when I first went to sign up, I was a little scared and I didn't know a lot of people. Several years in, I know a lot more people and it does feel like much warmer, much more welcoming because network that I have has been cultivated and I've added people throughout the years. It's nice to meet and re-meet some folks that I met years ago.
00:05:57
Speaker
on top of learning what else is cutting edge I get to see some old friends and colleagues and I think that for me that makes it for me and it makes it when you say like warm welcoming I imagine seeing my friends and colleagues at a conference and this is the one that does it for
Networking and Inclusivity at PSYOP
00:06:14
Speaker
me. Yeah and I'll have to add on to that the other thing that
00:06:17
Speaker
I love about PSYOP is the reception. They will never turn you away. Like, even if you're not part of that group, they will turn you away. So we measure success by how many receptions you got invited to, or you'll be able to crash. So that's how I always measure success for attending the conference. Isn't that a great measure of success? Like, even if you don't have an invite, you can just tag along and you'll
00:06:45
Speaker
No one's ever said, no, you're not from YZ company, so you have to leave. It's always been, hey, where are you from? Just come on in. We have beer. We have free food. Yeah. I think that's a great index of how good PSYOP is. How many parties can you crash after you met up with your friends, meet up with your friends, and then one person will have an invite and we all tailgate into that party and the next party and the one after that.
00:07:14
Speaker
if you have the energy to do so. But it is quite fun and exhilarating to meet other folks from other companies and organizations, and even schools, because schools host certain parties as well too. So it is nice. And there's a competition among schools that who is actually the best reception, who has the best food selection. So it keeps the bar sort of high.
00:07:39
Speaker
I love that. So what are some of the topics or let's talk with the format. So if you were to attend this conference for the first time, like what are some things to expect? I can take that one. And this is also kind of like a follow up to the earlier question that we had is sign up is a place where why I think it has high value to me is well, besides all the fun factor, there's also learning as
00:08:03
Speaker
element of it, because there's both like a practitioner and academia. So unlike like AOM, for example, Academy of Management, there are ones that they are that one is very much academic or academic driven. So what you learn there is people will present their work
00:08:23
Speaker
the paper format and they will literally like teach you this is a message, this is the results, this is our hypothesis. It's very theoretical. Yes, but Saya that's where you will see a lot more practitioners also there and they literally talking about how they actually apply some of the the learnings or the methodologies or the
00:08:44
Speaker
um the cutting-edge techniques to their work and literally every single sign up I will take away something that I can apply to my own work right away so it's not just like hey I learned this theoretic thing from school or from one professor but
00:09:03
Speaker
struggle to how to apply that and people be very real in sci-op too like I'm really hearing like panels will talk about Well, this is still the thing the challenge that we're dealing with right now We probably will share more in the next side of so panels. What else poster sessions? poster sessions
00:09:22
Speaker
Symposium? Symposium is the format where people literally I think four or five people will present the work that they've done this past year centered around a particular topic whether it's performance management, leadership development, coaching. They're also workshops so if you they have like the Friday seminars, the workshops, there's a lot of like hands-on stuff that you can do.
00:09:49
Speaker
And I think there's some, there's mentoring sessions as well too. So folks who have been going to site for a long time can actually sign up to be a mentor. And those who are just starting can actually look for a mentee as well too. So I've done that in the past as well to meet with folks and talk about the work in the field as well.
Research Discussions: Inclusivity and Stereotypes
00:10:20
Speaker
And don't forget about the sponsor exhibitions. Those are also something where you can get swags from different parties. And sometimes they'll do headshots for free. I did. I mean, I just updated my anything profile photo.
00:10:36
Speaker
the one that I had before was like from 12 years ago and I finally updated it in the one picture I got it was from the free headshot. Unlike some of the other conferences that I've been to where you will see there's a lot more like a vendor-sponsored
00:10:55
Speaker
things or the commercials that they're trying to promote their work or their product. Sci-op is a place where, yes, we do need that commercial sponsorship and that's how we get like the breakfast, those tea breaks. But in the session itself, there is a principle that we don't want this to be
00:11:15
Speaker
commercially branded session. So even though you get those first dips into what the sponsors were offering, but you don't feel like the content is very much driven by their product. That's something I really appreciate compared to some of the other commercialized conference. Likewise, I don't feel like we were being forced to watch a commercial for whatever the organization is. And I think
00:11:42
Speaker
like the moderators actually do a really good job of that, making sure that that doesn't come through. Those are so often when you go to a panel and it's all about a vendor trying to sell their services just so often. Something I noticed changed from previous year is they do now have a session series that dedicated to the sponsors now. So, but because there are
00:12:07
Speaker
Check this we're getting some ambient noise from echos after I don't think we mentioned that we're recording live So this is a very special session guys. We're all located in the same location. Yeah, we're all in New York and recording this episode We won't tell you where we are recording somewhere in New York We're here live in person what I was trying to say there it was I think before the Changes that have noticed for this year is they they do have a dedicated
00:12:37
Speaker
I think it's a dedicated session series where they have all the sponsors come and do attack demo. That's what they call it now. I don't see them doing this in the past because I have so many sessions happening co-currently. You don't feel like you're forced to watch their commercial
00:12:56
Speaker
But for people who are interested in how the technology or the product help their work, they can always check it out. So I think that they started to commercialize a little bit more than what they used to be doing. But people were given options. You can opt out. So they have these as part of the session. So they offer them in parallel with all the other sessions? Yeah. So they call this a tech demo. And most of the top sponsors will get the spotlight from there.
00:13:24
Speaker
Well, I know you two presented, Dr. Nguyen and Dr. Yu. Do you want to give us a very high-level overview of what you presented?
00:13:33
Speaker
Sure. So I was on a panel where we spoke about inclusive research and how we defined it and how it needs to basically continue so that we can continue to do research on the voices of marginalized communities. And of course, for me, I focused on Asian and Asian Americans and my other panelists did similar things. And I think in market research, so they focus on their particular realm.
00:14:01
Speaker
Okay. Cool. Yeah. And we were there to support. They both echo at Dr. Yu and Dr. Kim were there to support. So I was, I was very lucky to have my colleagues there with me. I actually enjoyed that session quite a bit. Um, I think there was a mentioning from your session, um, and they have been talking about this concept like, okay, we have always been looking at means for those employee experience, but when it comes to like a DI space,
00:14:30
Speaker
you got to look at the variance in those experience. And we as IO, we know what does this means from the statistic perspective. But it's also attaching the meaning to it. If you see there's a large variance, that means people are feeling very differently about this topic. And in some cases, we don't want that to be. That should be our goal, to minimize some of the difference that people are feeling about certain topics at work.
00:14:58
Speaker
So I love that call out. I do think that has a lot of implications how organizations should be doing DEI initiatives.
00:15:07
Speaker
Just recently, and this is kind of tangential, even the US Census. The US Census didn't even collect information on Asian and Asian Americans and what their ethnicities were until, I want to say, 2010 or 2000. So I would imagine companies sometimes may do that, too, where they kind of aggregate everybody together. But there are subtle differences. And it's nice to be able to break it down if you have enough folks.
00:15:32
Speaker
to see where certain sentiment lies right or different attitudes lie to disaggregate that or to aggregate it if it's similar. Asian and Asian Americans should be one of the segments that organizations should be targeting as well too you know. And don't commit the one of the seven deadly sins which is grouping Asians with white folks. No no that is a big big no no so if you are doing that
00:15:58
Speaker
our recommendation is not to just aggregate us whoa there are organizations that actually do that absolutely really or they were all back it as others because the only group you know who are they who they are actually looking at right and then everyone else is others
00:16:17
Speaker
You surprised Dr. Wen? In a way, yes, but kind of know. I would figure that, you know, Asian and Asian Americans, and this is kind of us as an aggregate, that we're a growing population, we have a lot of economic power behind us, that if you're going to do market research,
00:16:39
Speaker
Why not target us as well, too? Don't you want our money? Yeah, we love expensive stuff, right? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But just to give you an example, I'm not going to name names, but I used to work at a place where it was common for them to group
00:16:53
Speaker
Asian responses with the white groups and they never just aggregated the engagement survey data because they were just like, Oh, the Asians are doing fine. But because I was on that team, I had access to the survey data. And one day I just decided to deaggregate them. And I looked at questions about, do I see a future here? Like, do I see a path forward? Do I see myself developing with this company? And I looked at those responses by white, black, Latino and Asian. And two groups stood out with the lowest scores. Do you want to take a guess which groups those were?
00:17:24
Speaker
uh asians both asians and latinos african americans african americans and the latinos their scores were on the same level as the whites so that was interesting because i was like oh i assumed that the poc responses would be lower than the white responses so that was interesting to see it play out in a different way and that's why you got to disaggregate the data yeah yeah
00:17:52
Speaker
Uh, and for me, the session that I presented, there were two sessions that I got tapped into. The first one is more for my work. We had a session that people are talking about how the skills is because skill-based talent practice has been very trendy those days. We had folks from different tech companies talking about how they infuse this thinking in their conversation, in their performance.
00:18:18
Speaker
how the team is doing the job analysis at skill-based practice. And I think my topic is slightly different on how does that also tie into employees' development? How can we turn the skill-based development into a reality?
00:18:33
Speaker
And the second session is actually for my work from school. So I had a session with my advisor in school. This is one of the study in the research series that we're trying to explore for Asians. So the one we presented the year before was looking at the descriptive stereotypes for East Asians, South Asians, and white leaders.
00:18:57
Speaker
And this year, we presented on the sequence of it, which is the prescriptive stereotype, which are the desired traits and expectations for Asians. So this is how you should be? Yes. I mean, like, we definitely will have sessions in the future. We can all share about our dissertation topic, but my dissertation is built upon the session that I presented in PSYOP this year. So what was the main takeaway from that poster session? The biggest takeaway
00:19:26
Speaker
I made a mistake. I was actually quite surprised. So again, like just reiterate that the research findings were essentially in the research that we have find
00:19:46
Speaker
that Asians were expected to be more competent, to be more diligent, to be more independent. And so that wasn't like too much of a surprise as designers who follow along on our podcast. But what surprised me is during that session, like when I was presenting my posters,
00:20:07
Speaker
There are actually a lot more white participants who died in my session than Asians. I was surprised by that because the year before most people that talked to me was Asians or Asian students or practitioners. But this year I have very interesting conversation with two white professionals. Well, actually one is a professional.
00:20:29
Speaker
or practitioner the other one is more in the in the academia that's good because they should be the target i mean they should be included too right because this is relevant to them this is definitely like very relevant to them i would say and i think they also give me some inspiration some like
00:20:45
Speaker
or explanations on how I could interpret the data or the difference. I think, for example, like the white practitioner that I talked to, he actually kind of showed he is like disagreement on like, it's not like a disagreement to the results itself, but he was sharing like, he was very much involved in no co-Asian community. And what he has found is for the leaders in that community, they're also very outspoken, they're very,
00:21:13
Speaker
they actually have a lot of the traits that we identify like the white leaders that are associated with things. So I thought that was interesting. So these are communities like the Korean church but not the workplace? Not in the workplace, yes. And he was like unfortunately he didn't have enough of a visibility how those individuals perform at work because the scenario was very different but he had a hypothesis that
00:21:39
Speaker
those individuals will demonstrate a very similar traits, those white leaders will demonstrate our work. And I thought that was interesting. And the takeaway that he felt from there is like, I think, stereotypes forms when you have very limited information, when you have little expression to this person. And in his case, he's like, as the more that he interact with those Asians, with those folks in his community, he actually felt like, yes, like that disrupts a lot of those stereotypes.
00:22:09
Speaker
And also he felt a lot of the traits that we consider as successful pretty much stay the same, regardless of your race, which I think it's relevant to my dissertation. So I love how he is very engaged in that conversation. So the takeaway of that is more white people need to attend like Asian churches.
00:22:36
Speaker
or I mean like don't feel you're a foreign to those communities like they should be married to an Asian woman that's why he's involved or in Korea but that would be a really cool study to look at leaders within like certain Asian communities and see like how that do they translate their leadership
00:22:56
Speaker
to the workplace. Yeah. It's almost like leadership traits are still the leadership traits, meaning like this is race agnostic, but because it's race agnostic, because they're allowed to be that way. Like in that, let's say like, yeah, dominated Korean church, then you're a pastor and you're a youth leader, then yeah, but yeah, would that translate to the workplace where you're the only Asian person on your team? Yeah.
00:23:23
Speaker
Can I just say like, I'm just kind of dying over here laughing a little bit because we're having so much fun, but also like the importance of the work that we're putting out. I think it allows us to really put it out there to the community. And I'm reminded of a quote from Maya Angelou about how, and this is kind of me kind of going off the cuff here. I can't be the patient, both the patient and the doctor.
00:23:49
Speaker
so that if these are the things that are affecting me in terms of leadership or the incivilities of the microgravity that are affecting me, we need other folks as allies to see it, acknowledge it, and help us get through that. So it can't just be us. Yeah, we can't preach the choir. We need to bring others in.
00:24:11
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. That's a good sign. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other academics that went to my session, she actually find the results is quite interesting, which also speaks to her study, like she was looking at network effect, especially when those people are in school, like how does that network affecting them, the challenge to land a job after graduation.
The Role of Elite Networks in Careers
00:24:37
Speaker
And in her study that she find
00:24:40
Speaker
there's a race difference in terms like, she was looking at all those good schools, like the Ivy Leagues and how those people are kind of using that network effect to be able to land a job afterwards. And because we all know Asians are very much high education achievements, so we are very much represented in the Ivy Leagues. And so she find that difference is like,
00:25:07
Speaker
actually they're more likely to land a job and actually a better job than some of their peers after school. And I thought which actually validated my research because people view Asians as competent, as very diligent. So
00:25:22
Speaker
there has never been an issue for Asians to land a job. And we find that in the entry level. And that's the reason why they're over-represented in the entry-level roles. But I think the topic that we'll talk about here is the leadership gap. Once they're entering into the workforce, where is their role? Exactly. Leaky pipeline, leaky pipeline. The bamboo ceiling. Oh, I don't like that type.
00:25:53
Speaker
I like the glass ceiling. Yeah, there's a good term for it already. I feel like the glass ceiling gives you hopes and expectations that you can get up. Is there one for Latinos then? Here's the thing, I thought the glass ceiling was for everybody who wasn't white male. Yeah, I see that. So then why did Jane Yeon do the mani stealing? That's even more alienating in a way. It is, it is. It's a glass ceiling for all of us.
00:26:22
Speaker
We can edit that part. I didn't like her German band, we see it. I'm like, you tell me we're looking up, we see the band, we see it, we're still gonna go out there and just smash our face into it.
00:26:45
Speaker
I don't know, so what's the takeaway here? Where are you taking away from this hairstyle? I think set aside the session, one is very micro, like I wanted to share that experience with you. Hey, size don't matter! Micro experience is close!
00:27:05
Speaker
What is a micro experience? We're having to define this. Dr. Yu, could you define what a micro experience is? I'm going to share my micro experience. So the first day we went to the session, there's a best poster sessions, the first night that we arrived. Yes. And I saw there's a poster, they were talking about the professional cornering and the work horizon and perfectionism. And how does that affecting one's mental health?
00:27:35
Speaker
And I find super interesting results coming on from that. There is when you have a work professional calling,
00:27:43
Speaker
Meaning you actually feel according to what you do, you feel a sense of purpose to doing that. And when you are actually workaholic, which to a certain degree I feel like I checked the box there. That actually... Echos definitely a workaholic, yeah. You need to do a microintervention.
00:28:05
Speaker
And that actually will have a positive effect on your mental health. And so for folks around you, and now you can see why some people are workaholic and they're very happy, that probably also says they sense their work is important. They have a meaningful work to do. So they have an outlet. Yes. And then for people who, even though they have a strong calling, but they're also a perfectionist.
00:28:34
Speaker
actually they're gonna be suffer from like from the mental health perspective. I think the rationale probably or the explanation that the presenter gave me was because they are always strike for the professionist and because they have such a high calling from work they all constantly felt they felt that expectation of themselves. So I'm kind of glad I'm not in the perfectionist group.
00:29:03
Speaker
So you're a balanced workaholic. Yes, I like that. And so those are the little joys. I think we always remind me why we do research, why we are psychologists in the first place, or why we wanted to become an Iowa psychologist in the first place. It's reading those little research and study, and you were like, that makes sense. And that brings little joys to me.
00:29:29
Speaker
But I feel like you're probably also high on enjoying life because you travel, you bring your work with you, and I'm sort of like that too. I'm not as a workaholic like you, but you're able to balance that somehow. You can work while you're at a beach, looking at the beautiful Peruvian sunset, you know what I mean? And there are people who can't do that. And wondering why I'm still working. You both are amazing. What about you? I don't work hard anymore. Oh.
00:29:59
Speaker
Well, since we're on Little Joys, I actually ran into two of my professors from about 17 years ago who got me down the IO track. They were both there from Cedar Falls, Iowa, Northern Iowa, presenting some stuff on some student data that they gathered and presented a poster. For me, like the best part of SIAP with the Little Joys was actually seeing folks that I haven't seen in like maybe five, six, seven,
00:30:28
Speaker
17 years. Not everybody makes it to a SIOP conference and I would say like these last few years, I know there's a couple years we had to skip because of the pandemic and one of the first ones I went back to, one of the SIOPs I went back to was Seattle. I think that was about two years ago and I think it was in Boston a year ago but at Seattle just didn't feel the same as other SIOPs. I did feel that isolation
00:30:53
Speaker
Like we were still figuring things out with like COVID protocols, people checking their temp every day, reporting that. We didn't have to do that this time. It was nice to just see people, they brought their visitors, people brought their family, their partners, their children.
00:31:09
Speaker
Yeah, people snuck in, but we have love for those folks too. And it's always so nice to see so many familiar faces, so many people fighting for each other, encouraging each other to move on to continue to do their work and to push the field board. For me, that was the loveliest part of this SIA. They really felt like we all came together. Yeah, I think that's probably one of my parts about SIA is the community.
00:31:38
Speaker
I don't really go for the sessions. I go for the happy hours. I go for the reception to catch up. Go for the fun part. The fun part, yeah. And I'm going to catch up with people from my master's program, from my PhD program to see you guys. Yeah, I think that's probably the biggest joy for me when I go to SIOP. Yeah. I also wanted to share the big question that I take away from this year's SIOP.
00:32:07
Speaker
I think that it was during the opening plenary that the president or the chair, the very important lady that who has shared this is given like all the technology changes we have experienced, like how SIAP have evolved over the past few years, we see a lot more
00:32:30
Speaker
machine learning, AI, those things have been invading our discipline. You see way more data scientists than before attending those sessions. And that constantly reminds us the mission and the goal for IO psychology. I think she mentioned the two goals there was improving the quality of the workers and improving the function of the organizations.
00:32:59
Speaker
I feel like that's still very much relevant as of today, like all the work we do as a psychologist are towards those two goals, but the methodology or the way how we do this has shifted. So I constantly like remind myself, hey, why I'm doing this work and just going back to like my big calling earlier, like that high calling is like,
00:33:21
Speaker
Yes, those are the two goals. As an IO psychologist, that's how they gave me the identity. All the work that I'm doing is to serve those two goals.
Impact of AI and ML on IO Psychology
00:33:32
Speaker
But the way that we're doing those, whether this is about the traditional job analysis, or this is about how we capture employee voice, or this is about how we'd be able to screen the resumes, I think they're still very relevant.
00:33:49
Speaker
And as IO, we need to have a stronger voice in those processes as those technology invading our discipline. Yeah. Yeah. And also I think there's sort of like an existential crisis as well because IO psychology is premised on there being employees at the workplace. So if right now you will have a team of like 50, well, let's say in five years, you'll have a team of 10 because AI is taking over a lot of those roles. Like how relevant is our job? Yeah.
00:34:19
Speaker
I mean, I would say if you have a government contract, you have to follow certain guidelines in terms of selection, I think. So you'll have job security. No. So Dr. Wendy said he has job security. Absolutely not. I've been laid off before, so absolutely not.
00:34:35
Speaker
I think there's both sides of the coin there where I think AI and ML allows us to speed up certain things. But I think our expertise is still needed within organizations. For organizations that don't have an organizational psychologist, I would advocate that they get some within their organization.
00:34:57
Speaker
If you're going to adapt certain things, you want to know the rules and regulations that are there that we need to meet as employers, as those who are contracted out there, who work for the federal government. We have folks who actually understand that and know that. Can you make things fast? I think so. But you also want to make sure that things are also fair. And I think it's important for us. I would say this is like a Daniel Kyleman kind of thing. We need to be able to go fast and slow at the same time. Yeah.
00:35:26
Speaker
And to me, I think the implication is more about, as I know, we have always been interested in understanding the relationship between the technology and the human beings. So I slightly disagree your opinion that our job will go away, but it actually presents a bigger challenge for us. Do we actually help the organization to understand how the AI is impact our workflow? And how does AI really affect the employee's quality of productivity?
00:35:56
Speaker
And back to the earlier conversation we had on the two goals, I think that is still very relevant. Like even with the introduction of AI, can we, IO psychologists help understanding the impact of that to how does this like relate to like increase the productivity and improving the function of organization. So it's not just about people anymore, it's about that
00:36:24
Speaker
human and technology integration. So I would probably argue that we are probably not going to be out of job yet. And if anything, that actually creates more of a work for us as IO psychologists to be able to look at that.
00:36:43
Speaker
I hope so. I hope so. I mean, I hope that our job doesn't go away because we had spent four plus years of our lives getting this PhD only to have our job automated away. But I think there will be organizations that will do brash, make brasses. Absolutely. Oh, we're going to hire an AI, IO psychologist. Speaking of age, I found there's a product super interesting. And I know LinkedIn is also doing this, starting doing this. They're doing AI based coaching.
00:37:09
Speaker
And I went to one of their demo influencers, like a coaching is like a big field in our domain. Like there are we have alumni, we have ongoing students that are actually very good coaches or trying to learn to be a coach.
00:37:26
Speaker
And I went to one of their tech demos, which I thought was quite interesting. Personally, I do use, I do go to like Tragipity or some of the other GAI for questions or how to navigate a situation. And I like the concept that the AEI coach brings is they said,
00:37:45
Speaker
Coaching traditionally only sits in the leadership place where they provide the surveys, especially for companies, they provide the surveys to executives or the managers, senior leaders. However, there is a need to democratize some of those
00:38:07
Speaker
services to individual contributors, to the frontline workers, so they can also navigate the situation. I think they just hire coaches. But the coaches are very expensive. Jenny, you are a coach now, so you know how much you can pay. Jenny's very expensive.
00:38:24
Speaker
So it's a sliding scale. Slides upwards, right? We can definitely argue how useful the AI-based coach versus a human coach. And we also know there are so many factors that are impacting the quality of a coaching.
00:38:40
Speaker
I like the idea that they bring to this idea. I don't know if I would completely outsource it completely to like an AI, maybe the combination. Yeah. And because I think what they based on is they actually incorporate a lot of the coaching frameworks.
00:38:56
Speaker
into their responses. So build upon these large non-rich models. They also be able to bring the coaching frameworks and using that to guide the conversation and provide that coaching service. I saw their demo. I thought that was quite interesting, but
00:39:15
Speaker
But it was staged, wasn't it? They didn't have someone from the audience doing it. They had someone from the company ask pointed prompts. I would like to play around with it to see if I can break it because what we know from the data is that the data is biased. So these coaches are going to be biased. Well, I think that's one thing. The other thing there is I saw the responses they gave. I would say, is that necessarily meet my expectation how I would navigate
00:39:44
Speaker
a certain situation, probably not. But I think it's just a matter of time when they actually accumulate a lot more cases and a lot more experience from those training materials. But I really like the concept because I personally, I benefit from coaching a lot when there is a right person with a person.
00:40:07
Speaker
I feel like we should do some sort of experimental design with this where people are randomly assigned to coach real person or... Yeah, see how they do. That could be an interesting topic. I'm actually more open to that idea now, but when I saw that tool or the demo from that vendor, I was like, actually, one day I might try it. I wanted to test it out and see how helpful or how not helpful this is.
00:40:36
Speaker
All right. So do we have a haiku from chat GPT? We can do it now. Okay. Here's the, uh, we asked chat GPT to write us a haiku by the society of four industrial and organizational psychology conference. And this is what we got. Minds converge insights. Psyop sparks innovation. Workplace wisdom blooms. Nice. Yeah. I like that version. Yeah.
00:41:05
Speaker
Alright, so that means our conclusion for this episode. Yeah. Thank you everyone for tuning in to Hidden in Plain Sight, all things Asian in the workplace. Oh, and one more announcement. We are going to be taking a break over the summer. So this is our last episode for season.
00:41:22
Speaker
Two, and this is gonna allow us to take a break, give you guys a break, and our plan is to come back mid-July, end of July, mid-July, or season three, and that's gonna help us keep the cadence of about, you know, 10 episodes per season, two seasons per year. We'll see you in the summer. Yes.
00:42:18
Speaker
you