Thanks for putting this together @SebastianSchmidt and @Amine. I appreciate you being conservative with your conclusions. However, my takeaway is that—even at their lowest ROI, it is still worthwhile for orgs to invest in the mental health and productivity of their staff, at least on a trial basis so they can determine through their own research how impactful the program is.
A couple of more considerations:
It may be more worthwhile for investment from EA umbrella funders that don’t care if the person moves to a different org but stays within EA.
I personally believe that these sorts of investments early in someone’s career (the first 5–10 years) have compounding returns as that person grows their scope and impact.
Certainly, there’s much worth additional follow-up, but overall this is a great result that will hopefully encourage HR and managers to feel more comfortable making investments here. If anyone wants to have a conversation around what that might look like, please do reach out to @SebastianSchmidt, @Inga, or myself (@Dave Cortright) who are passionate about making this happen.
Thanks, Dave! Yes, we found that even the conservative estimate indicates that this can be a worthwhile investment and I feel more robustly good about folks investing in experimenting with high-quality services. That said, some initiatives have significantly higher ROI than 3.7 (our upper bound) so people will have to make individual judgment calls.
In terms of your considerations:
This seems right to me. I also want to stress that I think it’s likely that some of the people who could benefit the most from these services aren’t currently working at organizations. E.g., individual researchers who don’t have anything that resembles management and other beneficial structures typically found within organizations.
Seems true to me! However, even very senior people may benefit a lot from this. For example, many of the big tech CEOs (e.g., Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai) were coached by Bill Campbell and attributed significant value to that coaching.
Thanks for putting this together @SebastianSchmidt and @Amine. I appreciate you being conservative with your conclusions. However, my takeaway is that—even at their lowest ROI, it is still worthwhile for orgs to invest in the mental health and productivity of their staff, at least on a trial basis so they can determine through their own research how impactful the program is.
A couple of more considerations:
It may be more worthwhile for investment from EA umbrella funders that don’t care if the person moves to a different org but stays within EA.
I personally believe that these sorts of investments early in someone’s career (the first 5–10 years) have compounding returns as that person grows their scope and impact.
Certainly, there’s much worth additional follow-up, but overall this is a great result that will hopefully encourage HR and managers to feel more comfortable making investments here. If anyone wants to have a conversation around what that might look like, please do reach out to @SebastianSchmidt, @Inga, or myself (@Dave Cortright) who are passionate about making this happen.
Thanks, Dave! Yes, we found that even the conservative estimate indicates that this can be a worthwhile investment and I feel more robustly good about folks investing in experimenting with high-quality services. That said, some initiatives have significantly higher ROI than 3.7 (our upper bound) so people will have to make individual judgment calls.
In terms of your considerations:
This seems right to me. I also want to stress that I think it’s likely that some of the people who could benefit the most from these services aren’t currently working at organizations. E.g., individual researchers who don’t have anything that resembles management and other beneficial structures typically found within organizations.
Seems true to me! However, even very senior people may benefit a lot from this. For example, many of the big tech CEOs (e.g., Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai) were coached by Bill Campbell and attributed significant value to that coaching.
Yes, we’re happy to support follow-ups!