Hidetaka Honda, CEO of KAKEAIThe traditional roles of HR, such as talent management and understanding the actual situation through organizational engagement surveys, remain unchanged. Suddenly, organizations are digitizing and shifting business domains at an exponential rate such that their strategies and tactics permeate the entire organization to optimize daily actions. Amid this pandemonium, individual managers are expected to understand the current status of their employees and smoothly resolve any issues that the employees may face. In addition, managers are required to integrate the organization’s direction while ensuring the same for individual employees, encouraging them to exert their abilities in their current jobs. All in all, to increase engagement with employees, it is adequate to create opportunities for dialogue not only with their direct supervisors but also with managers in neighbouring departments and even higher-level positions.
New-Age Problems need a New-Age Solution
Enter KAKEAI, an AI cloud system that improves the status of member management in the middle management layer. “We are strengthening our services by focusing on increasing the efficiency of one-on-one interaction time to improve the quality of the relationship,” says Hidetaka Honda, CEO of the firm. KAKEAI makes this possible by designing diverse opportunities for dialogue, hence diversifying the perspectives of employees whose vision is often obscured by WFM, leading them tosee their daily lives in a completely different light.
On the flip side, the team at KAKEAI understands that, from the employee’s point of view, performance tends to be influenced by the relationship with the current boss. However, with the intervention of asystem, it becomes easier to build a working relationship in steps. The system can also play a crucial role in improving in an otherwise already great relationship where both the manager and the employee think they are already communicating well.
“The current situation is that people management is a means to achieve people success, and 1-on-1 meetings are the starting point of our platform,” informs Mr Honda. The 1-on-1 meeting, a one-on-one dialogue between the manager and the employee, is the last mile of the strategy.
It is not our intention to improve the efficiency of 1-on-1 meetings.We believe that you will understand this point
How was KAKEAI built?
The most core and unique technology of KAKEAI is an algorithm that captures the differences between people based on brain science and suggests ways to interact with them based on these differences. Combining this core technology with a unique mechanism, data is used to solve the root cause of the impersonal nature of people management. Questions such as, What kind of supervisor? What kind of subordinates? Under what circumstances and how they interact? How subordinates feel about it? has made managers worldwide to have access to the best management knowledge at their fingertips, tailored to their people and situations.
By providing the necessary and sufficient data to solve the organizational issues of management and HR departments, KAKEAI can grasp the actual business operations and thoroughly address the problems of its daily users managers and employees. This is embodied in the form of preparation and implementation screens for 1-on-1 meetings.
KAKEAI has gone a step ahead and has completed integration with Microsoft Office 365 accounts, Teams, Google Workplace accounts, and Slack.“In addition, by providing services in the cloud, we not only provide thorough customer support, but also collaborate with several researchers to conduct joint research in order to solve essential corporate issues,” informs Mr Honda. Some of the up-and-coming researchers in market design include Takehito Kojima, Professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Economics (Director of the University of Tokyo’s Market Design Center), Hiroto Komano, a researcher in neuroscience at Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Takashi Iwamoto, a specially appointed professor at Keio University’s Graduate School of Business Administration.
What makes KAKEAI Unique?
KAKEAI is unique in that it helps employees and managers to interact effectively with minimal preparation. The firm provides managers with tips on how to interact effectively with employees. Managers who have started to use KAKEAI have increased employee growth and have strategically positioned people management in their management tasks and 1-on- 1 meetings, which are one-on-one dialogues. Managers are expected not only to respond to individual employees according to their situation and current capabilities but also to interact with them appropriately while considering their future expectations. It will become increasingly important for managers to grasp the current situation of each employee accurately.
Their innovative technology has gained popularity outside of Japan as well. KAKEAI holds 1-on-1 meetings with local employees in Tokyo, New York, London, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong to increase engagement by significant companies. The firm has earned many accolades along the way and is the first Japanese company to be 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). The company has also won the Silver Award at HRM Asia Readers Choice 2020, one of the largest HR awards in Asia and the innovation Award at the 5th HR Technology Awards in 2020, apart from the grand prize at the Digital HR Competition 2020. “We will continue our research on 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,” concludes Mr Honda.
