OVERVIEW
Inspira’s Machine Suite underwent testing to evaluate its capacity for reducing the average task completion time for an experienced employee at a digital marketing company.
Over the duration of the 136-day experiment, the average completion time dropped from 14.05 minutes to 2.95 minutes, almost five times faster.
THE EXPERIMENT
The day-to-day duties of the project manager were generally repetitive, and the participant was chosen for the experiment due to the homogenous nature of their duties.
Inspira’s ‘Machine Suite‘ software was activated to autonomously monitor, asses and motivate the employee toward behaviour change. The employee had not been primed or prepared in any way, prior to the experiment.
The Machine Suite is productivity optimization software, which operates autonomously to monitor productivity, identify bottlenecks and coach users into more productive habits.
The Machine Suite has multiple ‘intervention’ systems that can communicate with employees and managers. In this experiment, the MOE system was employed (Metrics Optimization Engine).
MOE utilizes a method called confirmation of implementation intentions to motivate participants to double down on their previous commitments.
From January 1st through April 18th, 2023, the average time to complete tasks was 14.05 minutes.
On April 18th, the Machine Suite was activated. The Machine Suite almost immediately identified opportunities for improvement and began communicating with the employee.
There were initially four rounds of autonomous interventions with the employee, which were triggered when the Machine’s ‘Recollection Engine’ detected a pattern of behavior that might be improved. The fourth round resulted in the employee reaching out to management with a promise to improve. This promise was suggested to the employee by MOE.
SUMMARY
Within two weeks of activating the autonomous system, the employee’s behavior meaureably changed. Over the following four months of the experiment, MOE continued to intervene as needed, and by the final week of the study, the average time to complete a task had been reduced to 2.95 minutes, a 79% reduction off the original 14.05 minutes.
The sample size of this experiment was one person, so this result is not a reliable predictor of how the Machine Suite woud perform across a larger, more diverse participant sample. It does however illustrate that a fully autonomous system can be an effective aid in the optimization of productivity. Such a system could have measureble impact on employees who’s work has been digitized, thus allowing for precise monitoring and targeting of specific types of tasks.