"I think businesses should focus on the basics – great customer service & products, a motivating and energizing work environment."
Neela Saldanha is the Executive Director at the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) at Yale University. By training, she is a behavioral scientist and has deep experience in applying behavioral science in the public and private sectors. Neela was mentioned in Forbes magazine as “Ten Behavioral Scientists You Should Know”. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review and Behavioral Scientist and she has been a speaker at various events including Nudgestock (the world’s biggest behavioral science festival run by Ogilvy Consulting)
Neela was the Founding Director of the Center for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC) at Ashoka University, India. CSBC is funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the mission to create and advance impactful behavior change interventions for marginalized populations. She has also consulted with several organizations working on behavior change such as the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics and Surgo Ventures and has designed and taught behavioral science courses to students and professionals.
Neela combines her skills in the social sector with deep private sector expertise. Over 15 years in the private sector she led teams in brand management, consumer insights, strategy consulting, and behavioral science at Nestle, Unilever, Accenture, and PepsiCo, across India and in global roles.
Neela has a Ph.D. in Marketing (Consumer Behavior) from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from IIM Calcutta, India.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Neela Saldanha: I currently lead a research initiative at Yale – the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). The mission of Y-RISE is to advance the science of scaling policies for development. For example, a pilot program (such as giving subsidies to encourage migration when there is a “lean season” which has a huge effect on wages and food consumption) may work on a small scale but what should governments and society be aware of when it scales to cover millions of people? And how can we be sure that something that works in one environment translates to another?
By training, I’m a behavioral scientist so I’m fascinated by how people behave. I started my career in marketing in India where I saw first-hand how, for example, salience and availability via distribution and displays in-store had such an effect on consumer behavior. There were so many fascinating questions that I got a PhD in Marketing after a few years because I wanted to learn how to systematically understand human behavior.
A few years ago, I moved into the social impact space: I relocated from the US to India (where I was born and grew up) to set up a Center for Social and Behavior Change. Moving from selling chips at PepsiCo to persuading poor communities to adopt family planning techniques was quite the shift! But I wouldn’t have it any other way and I’ve learned so much in my days as a marketer that I bring to other behavior change challenges every day.
Among the things I do, I’m really proud to be a Board member of The Life You Can Save, an organization that promotes effective giving in the fight against global poverty.
2020 and 2021 threw a lot of curve balls into business on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past couple years, how can businesses thrive in 2022? What lessons have you learned?
Neela Saldanha: As a behavior scientist, I realize the importance of context in shaping our behavior. And certainly, our regular contexts and environments have been disrupted. This can be both a challenge and an opportunity. We know the challenges associated with the uncertainty that we’ve all faced. But we also know that new environments promote new habits.
Businesses can thrive by recognizing the opportunity to create new habits instead of sticking to the status quo (a bias we all have, sadly!). For example, transitioning to telehealth or figuring out ways for home delivery and home services are opportunities. These opportunities can be a win-win for business and society: with restrictions on travel and meeting large groups, businesses can help shape consumer behavior around more climate-friendly options (shopping online and aggregating delivery for example). But the businesses that succeed will be those that don’t succumb to the “sunk cost” fallacy – taking past costs into consideration when deciding to continue (or not) with investments. In effect they should ask themselves “if we were to start this business today, would we do it?”
Businesses also have an opportunity in this time of the “Great Resignation” to attract talent by reinventing working. Organizations that experiment with and scale up innovative working models – whether job-share, part-time or flex work or permanent hybrid and remote roles will thrive as they will have a headstart in recruiting and retaining talent.
The pandemic seems to keep on disrupting the economy, what should businesses focus on in 2022? What advice would you share?
Neela Saldanha: I think businesses should focus on the basics – great customer service & products, a motivating and energizing work environment. What that means in the pandemic is different but the basics don’t change. And good businesses recognize that.
How has the pandemic changed your industry and how have you adapted?
Neela Saldanha: I work in global development. So we obviously had a lot of COVID 19 work to do – from researching the impact of community masks wearing in Bangladesh (yes, they work!) to understanding what strategies could improve vaccination in low & middle-income countries in Asia and Africa. A lot of the world’s attention has been diverted to this. But this has come at the expense of other issues – extreme global poverty still exists, At the Life You Can Save, for example, we advocate for giving to end extreme poverty. But in the pandemic, we are constantly having to think of new ways to get people’s attention – yes even to something as serious as global poverty. I’m talking about people living on less than $1.90 a day, children dying of malaria, that kind of thing.
We’ve obviously taken on COVID-19 work and put on hold other pieces of work. Work-wise, I think the main way we have adapted is by working remotely. This has been great because, for example, in the studies we run, we require teams of researchers working cross-country. In the masks study alone, we had team members from US, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and South Africa and remote working made it possible for us to collaborate in real time. It prevented us from defaulting to include only people who are “in the room where it happened” because now the world is our room, thanks to Zoom and other video-conference technologies!
What advice do you wish you received when the pandemic started and what do you intend on improving in 2022?
Neela Saldanha: I wish someone would have told me that the pandemic wasn’t going to be over in three or six months but would take years. The uncertainty has been just as stressful as the ups and downs and prevented us from making radical changes to our business environments.
In 2022, work-wise, I would love to find new ways to motivate my teams that are often geographically dispersed. I don’t think the solution is “oh everyone should get back to the office” – we’ve seen too many benefits of remote working to do that – but rather figure out how to make the technology work better for us.
Personally? I would LOVE to better manage screen time, particularly social media. Easier said than done, and I’m trying to bring all my behavioral science “tricks’ to help make it work!
Online business surged higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for 2022?
Neela Saldanha: I think many of these will continue to surge in wealthy countries and I hope we see innovation and new models in this area. People, particularly in wealthy countries with enough vaccination, may prefer a hybrid experience, so online businesses that thrived in the early stages of the pandemic may have to figure out how to evolve a hybrid presence. For example, hyper-local delivery of online items for those mundane things you drive 3 min to the store for.
However, in many parts of the world, online connectivity is still an issue, so that’s the first thing that will need to be resolved. The pandemic has taught us that digital connectivity and the internet is not a luxury and countries will have to invest in bandwidth and technology.
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a screen?
Neela Saldanha: Too many to count I’m afraid. I’m trying to get it down and it is hard to do in a time when screens seem to be more in our lives than ever. I always think “well I’ll just use them less when the pandemic ends’ and I think I need a new strategy!
The majority of executives use stories to persuade and communicate in the workplace. Can you share with our readers examples of how you implement that in your business to communicate effectively with your team?
Neela Saldanha: So I have a story not about my day job but about The Life You Can Save. This is an organization that started with a book of the same name that Peter Singer, a very influential philosopher (if you’ve seen “The Good Place” you can see his influence in it!) wrote a few years ago. (The book by the way is available for free on the Life You can Save website). The problem here is that that we can’t cope with vast amounts of suffering. we see that during Covid – we can’t deal with millions of deaths. After some time, it stops making an impact. It’s a natural human tendency.
So Peter has this wonderful story, called The Drowning Child. It goes like this: on your way to work one day you see a toddler who looks like she is drowning in a small pond. You could easily wade in and pull her out and her life will be saved. But if you wade in, you will ruin your new shoes and be late to work. What would you do? And of course everyone says, they would jump in and rescue the child – the thought that one would even weigh damage to shoes against a human life is absurd. And then he delivers the punchline – well, around 5 million children died in 2017 from preventable causes. We could all easily have waded in and saved their lives by donating to solutions that are proven to work – at no significant cost to ourselves. And yet, even when we say we would rescue a drowning child in the hypothetical, we don’t do it for thousands in reality.
And I think that’s a really powerful story because it gets emotion back into the abstract idea. It forces us to think by making things super simple. And it is memorable. And I think that’s really an effective way to communicate versus telling people, oh you should donate or bombarding them with statistics. You bring it down to that one person, one story.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as the real challenge right now?
Neela Saldanha: Businesses are people. Those people right now are struggling with the pandemic – whether ill themselves or a family member, getting services, mental health issues, not being able to see family, and so on. And many of those people are evaluating “what is my purpose right now”? So businesses that operate “as usual” are not going to be inspiring enough for people to give their best in these challenging circumstances. Yes, businesses have to maximize shareholder value and are not non-profits. Still, they can take a leading & authentic role in certain collective issues. Take climate change. This is an area where companies can actually do something – whether through investment in direct technologies such as recycling or other green technologies, reducing waste or bringing their skills to the table to solve a collective, global problem. This can be a win-win for the company because reducing waste helps the company’s bottom line as well.
The challenge I see is that businesses will look on such problems as “either-or” and will continue to ignore them because they are too difficult, too inconvenient and nobody else is doing them. And then we will have a real problem!
In 2022, what are you most interested in learning about? Crypto, NFTs, online marketing, or any other skill sets? Please share your motivations.
Neela Saldanha: I would love to learn more about online/digital marketing – I think it has become a necessary skill set for all marketers. I grew up in a largely offline world, so I definitely need to upgrade those skills. Marketing is always important – whether you are ‘marketing” research or asking people to donate to end world poverty. And relatedly, I would love to improve my data science skills – the key is to harness all the vast amounts of data to get insights about consumers & populations.
I am intrigued by crypto. Charities like The LIfe You Can Save are encouraging crypto donations so I am curious to see how we can expand giving through crypto.
A record 4.4 million Americans left their jobs in September in 2021, accelerating a trend that has become known as the Great Resignation. 47% of people plan to leave their job during 2022. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. Do you think leaders see the data and think “that’s not me – I’m not that boss they don’t want to work for? What changes do you think need to happen?
Neela Saldanha: Well, we always do that, don’t we? It’s always “other people”. In psychology, its a very basic human tendency – called the “fundamental attribution error” where when we do something negative, we ascribe it to the situation (oh, my boss just gave us this urgent piece of work to do, so I had to have my team work late, there’s nothing I could do”) vs. when others do it, we attribute it to the person they are (they must be a terrible boss, that’s why they make people work late). So I think that maybe many of us don’t realize we are those ‘bad bosses”.
The fix is easy – listen to your people! But are we prepared to do it and importantly, make the changes they want to see? I think we fear that the changes may be too drastic – but need they be? As business leaders, we ourselves may suffer from “loss aversion” – as human beings, losses loom larger than gains for us, so we often don’t change even when we think we should. In reality, the changes required may be small – maybe small fixes can significantly improve working life to the extent that people don’t have to make this choice. The only way to figure out is experiment.
So yes, I would say that we have to listen more carefully and not just when people quit!
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Neela Saldanha: The ability to forecast accurately! Currently, the only way to learn it is by painful trial & error, so I do wish I had that already so I didn’t have to learn it. And think how useful it could be – to make radical changes and investments (should we? Shouldn’t we?), to figure out what’s critical in the moment and 6 months later vs. not, to figure out what is new & likely to stay vs. a fad. Oh, if only I could have that!
What does “success” in 2022 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Neela Saldanha: Leading a full & meaningful life – doing work that matters to me (and I hope brings some good in the world), being healthy, having solid relationships. And being more like my cat – living in the present and doing things that bring joy
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Neela Saldanha for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Neela Saldanha or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
