IN his best-selling new book,
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Wharton professor Adam
Grant — a recent TED speaker — explores why some people are more
successful than others in championing new ideas. In this brief excerpt
from the first chapter, he shares some surprising discoveries about what
people reveal about themselves when they choose a web browser for their
computer.
Not long ago, economist Michael Housman
was leading a project to figure out why some customer service agents
stayed in their jobs longer than others. Armed with data from more than
30,000 employees who handled calls for banks, airlines, and cell-phone
companies, he suspected that their employment histories would contain
telltale signs about their commitment.He thought that people with a history of job-hopping would quit sooner, but they didn’t: Employees who had held five jobs in the past five years weren’t any more likely to leave their positions than those who had stayed in the same job for five years.
Hunting for other hints, he noticed that his team had captured information about which internet browser employees had used when they logged in to apply for their jobs. On a whim, he tested whether that choice might be related to quitting. He didn’t expect to find any correlation, assuming that browser preference was purely a matter of taste. But when he looked at the results, he was stunned: Employees who used Firefox or Chrome to browse the web remained in their jobs 15 per cent longer than those who used internet Explorer or Safari.
Thinking it was a coincidence, Housman ran the same analysis for absences from work. The pattern was the same: Firefox and Chrome users were 19 per cent less likely to miss work than internet Explorer and Safari fans.
Then he looked at performance. His team had assembled nearly three million data points on sales, customer satisfaction, and average call length. The Firefox and Chrome users had significantly higher sales, and their call times were shorter. Their customers were happier, too: After 90 days on the job, the Firefox and Chrome users had customer satisfaction levels that internet Explorer and Safari users reached only after 120 days at work.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/what-your-web-browser-says-about-you/news-story/c577c19e272aadaa18bc82fe2a456957