KAKEAI

For Hidetaka Honda, a successful businessman and technology evangelist, the better part of his career at Recruit—an eminent human resources company headquartered in Japan—had been a pleasant sail. While holding an important position at the company, Honda had successfully executed multiple large-scale projects, receiving positive feedback for his hard work and bringing about a big difference to the organization. Growing in confidence, Honda continued to excel at his job and was eventually promoted to the HR department of the holding company. However, the excitement and elation of taking on a new role soon waned as his journey took an unexpected turn with anonymous feedback: “Did you know that no one wants to follow you? I wonder if you have ever considered getting a better knowledge of management.” The confidence that Honda had built over the years started dwindling, and his interactions with fellow team members thereafter were clouded by fear and anxiety.

“I was managing my team members based on my own experiences and feelings, which is how I would want to be managed. Surprisingly, I was wrong,” shares Honda. He realized that it is not always appropriate to manage people with one’s experiences or gut-based decisions. Rather, it is important for the management to know a person, discern how different he/ she is, embrace the difference, and understand how to interact with him/her. With this vision, Honda established KAKEAI, an organization committed to improving the interaction between middle managers and the workforce with its ingenious AI Cloud System. Honda, CEO of KAKEAI, states that the relationship between managers and team members has a 20 percent impact on productivity, 50 percent on profitability, and 30 percent on the engagement score. However, HR and the management are constantly faced with the challenge of switching from group managing to individual managing. Fact is, despite technological innovations taking over all major aspects of the HR industry, the solution for meaningful interaction between managers and employees has typically been gut-based. Adopting a one-on-one approach has also failed in many instances. Besides, with the widening generation gap, growing diversity, employee demands, and unstable business environment, managers are busier than ever to effectively tackle the issues. But fret not! KAKEAI is here to help managers make the most of each employee’s abilities and provide them with the best opportunities through its innovative cloud system.

An Intuitive System Comes to Managers’ Aid

KAKEAI’s core technology is built on a patented algorithm that uses brain science to identify the differences between people and suggests how to relate to others. This helps formulate recommendations for managers on how they should individually interact with their staff. KAKEAI has introduced a SaaS solution that acts as an ‘AI People Manager’ for employees, managers, human resources, and top management. The KAKEAI system equips clients with four different types of user permissions— members, managers, directors, and HR administrators, whereby managers can leave notes on a daily basis about their conversations with specific members on the “session” page. KAKEAI utilizes an original questionnaire—“self assessment”— underpinned by brain science, which consists of 32 questions and requires just 10 minutes to answer.

KAKEAI provides managers access to the exceptional people management knowledge that is relevant to their members and circumstances

Team members would be asked questions on what they think about their jobs and more, to which they can reply by choosing the most relevant answer. Based on the result of the self-assessment queries, managers can get an understanding of how to motivate the employees and encourage them to boost their performance. Through the “future career visions and goals in 3-5 years” section of the page, managers are reminded of what is best for a particular member while leaving daily notes and advising. Managers can also send suggestions to each member, to which responses can be either a mere click of the “understood” button or sending back questions.

The system also comes with a “differences between you and your colleagues” page that allows users to understand and embrace the differences, and work in harmony. In addition, KAKEAI also provides a “caring” button for members as a support function to managers. This can be used to notify the managers, directors, or even HR if a certain project is on schedule or if there needs to be an adjustment between the people involved. More importantly, the KAKEAI system empowers the authority to be proactive in solving the problems, before any trouble surfaces.

Admins can view all the caring information exchanged between people and how the issues were resolved on the “caring summary” page. There is also a “priority checking” function that allows HR admins to check the influence of each caring information and if the reported individual identifies the problem along with predicting if the manager involved is capable of remediating the issue. Other than the “caring” function, KAKEAI also offers “management improvement score” based on monthly hearings to identify if a manager is able to skillfully supervise the members.

People Management at the Core

KAKEAI empowers clients in the three key areas of management capability, knowledge sharing, and HR efficiency. With respect to management capability, by leveraging the company’s solution, managers can discover the traits of an employee and identify a suitable working environment to yield maximum performance. They receive notifications when their employees face any problem, along with specific advice on solving the problem and the ‘Dos and Don’ts.’ These functions make it possible for managers to see through the team better and have fewer failures when they are not sure how to interact with the members.

In the area of knowledge sharing, KAKEAI’s solution constantly builds a knowledge base on people management, including both manager and employee details and the actions they performed. “KAKEAI provides managers access to the exceptional people management knowledge that is relevant to their members and circumstances. This cannot be brought about by a talent management system, training, coaching, and books,” says Honda. In addition, to enhance HR efficiency, the solution empowers HR teams to gain accurate and detailed information about employee-manager relationships to analyze the activities in the office.

What makes KAKEAI’s solution different from existing people management tools is its ability to support managers and members in making the best of one-on-one meetings, and not just accumulate data. Managers get to understand the difference between themselves and team members from self-assessments while receiving additional information from the caring function to gain a better knowledge of their members. In addition, managers get recommendations on different members and themselves, along with successful case studies by other managers across the globe. By utilizing KAKEAI’s solution, the upper authority will also be able to view the accurate status of their team members to get a clear picture of how the organization is running.

"KAKEAI is driven by the mission to become the perfect partner for the middle management—the key to corporate management— by helping them eliminate the stressful and time-consuming gut-based people management practice and adopting a simple one"

KAKEAI ensures there is no bias or gut-based decisions being made based on the experience of individuals during one-on-one meetings. From the interaction logs between managers and members, KAKEAI extracts the best knowledge and makes it accessible to other managers. This, in turn, enhances the quality of corporate people management in ways never imagined before. Data pertaining to the performance and activities of each office can be filed through KAKEAI’s solution, which can be accessed by the HR and other upper management members to enhance management in corporations.

Making a Difference

Honda mentions that a tight labor market in Japan has resulted in a high retirement risk for corporations. In fact, the increasing demand for lesser working hours but more productivity and the introduction of stringent workplace harassment rules have made the situation even worse for managers. “To this end, KAKEAI is driven by the mission to become the perfect partner for the middle management—the key to corporate management—by helping them eliminate the stressful and time-consuming gut-based people management practice and adopting a simple one,” Honda notes.

Founded in 2018, the company released features consistently in phases from February 2019 and is currently focusing on marketing its service. KAKEAI has already been awarded the Grand Prix in the “HR Tech GP 2019 Final” contest held in Japan to commend HR Tech services that contribute to solving problems in the “work” field. In addition, KAKEAI is also selected as one of the Pitchfest 30 companies at the “HR Technology Conference & Expo 2019,” a premier HR technology event.

KAKEAI has been successful in improving the performance of individuals using the patented algorithm, which the company plans to enhance over time. It also aims to expand its services to SMBs in Japan and large corporations in English speaking counties. The company has already started developing and testing the English version of its solution. While accommodating data related to people management, the company is keen on linking to other products that provide talent management, management by objectives (MBO), and OKE services. Besides, KAKEAI is considering foraying into the field of recruiting and onboarding while looking at expanding its service from B2B and B2C model, targeting each manager as an individual.