In this article, we make a case for the importance of understanding the
emotional needs of employees, and we review difficulties experienced to
date in doing so. We then describe a new neuropsychologically-based
approach to overcoming past assessment challenges to measuring employee
emotions. The new approach, called AgileBrain®, can be applied in a
broad range of business situations where emotional learning is desired,
and in particular can help researchers gain access to emotions that
people, whether employees, leadership, or board members, can’t – or
don’t want to – talk about.
AgileBrain is a synthesis of two threads of scientific work: one thread
arises from neuroscience findings about non-verbal image processing and
involves a method for creating a dialogue directly with the emotional
brains of research respondents. The other thread builds upon a
comprehensive review of motivational theory, to develop a new model for
systematically describing employee motives. This model is used as the
foundation for a library of validated images that form a “vocabulary”
of motivational-emotional stimuli, which then lets researchers interpret
subjects’ responses in the AgileBrain task.
Validation results for AgileBrain are presented in the second portion of
this article. There, we present results conducted on employee emotions
during the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrate the tremendous power of
this type of emotional assessment in predicting important health and
wellbeing outcomes, such as employee mental health and vulnerability to
addiction.