Zsófi Belovai

Meet Zsófi

Zsófi is a behavioural science lead at MoreThanNow for the organisational performance practice, working with the largest FTS500 employers. In her day-to-day, she uses randomised controlled trials, behavioural insights, and data science to improve a range of organisational outcomes in areas such as leadership development and performance management. Zsófi and the MTN team’s work has been published in business journals such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

1. If you were to describe what you do to your friends and family at a dinner party, how would you explain it, and what motivated you to pursue the role?

It's always a bit difficult, but I’m a Behavioural Science Lead at MoreThanNow, where I’ve been for almost five years. I focus on organisational performance—projects related to performance management, team dynamics, leadership, and learning and development. I also manage a small team of one and work on randomised controlled trials to evaluate the impact of interventions in the workplace, always aiming for academic rigour. We collaborate with academics globally to ensure the quality of our work, sometimes even leading to publication.

Growing up, I always loved being in the corporate office with my dad, and this sparked my interest in organisational development. I studied psychology at university and I always kept coming back to thinking about how I can connect this to my interest in organisations. After some HR internships that I really enjoyed, I was pretty set that I wanted a meaningful job that applied behavioural science in businesses. In my third year, I had a lecture by Helena Rubenstein from Innovia Consulting. After that I was like right, this is what I need to do so I applied to LSE for a master’s in behavioural science. During my master's, I saw an opening at MoreThanNow and applied, though I didn’t know much about the company. After going through the rounds of interviews, I was offered a three-month internship, which later turned into a full-time role. Since then, I've progressed within the company, applying behavioural science in organisations - I never thought that this combination could exist, but it found me somehow.

2. Was there anything particularly surprising when you started working at MoreThanNow?

Quite a lot, actually. We're a small company, and although I had startup experience, behavioural science in a business context was different. A lot of the learning involved getting out of the academic mindset—understanding that these are real companies and real people. Most of these people don’t know what we’re talking about when we say significance level. Being able to explain behavioural science to lay people in a legitimate but understandable way and letting go of the jargon was quite hard to learn. I also learned that interventions often are not necessarily based just on literature. A lot of it relies on co-creation with clients and using what they have found to work in their specific culture.

3. Which skills from your master's have been most helpful in your current role?

Research methodology and data skills are definitely the top two that I use the most. MoreThanNow’s quite a special place in the sense that most of us did the LSE Behavioural Science masters so a lot of what we do is based on the LSE master's curriculum, especially knowing the randomised controlled trial methodology inside out. Data analysis skills also always come in handy; I use them every day, and we handle increasingly complex datasets.

4. Do you have any recommendations for someone looking to enter this field?

I'm increasingly seeing Python being used all across the industry, and I’m also really quickly working to learn it myself. It makes many tasks easier and is often required by employers. R is also useful—it's open-source and great for data analysis. Personally, I work with Stata, but I wish I had started with Python earlier.

5. Could you describe what a typical day or week looks like for you?

No two days are the same, which I like. We usually work on 6-7 projects at the same time which each last between 6-8 months. My days include client and internal meetings, data analysis, preparing for events, and designing interventions. There’s a lot of variety - it's not a boring job! We fortunately still have a good work-life balance, so it’s about efficiently dividing time during the week.

6. What makes MoreThanNow's approach unique compared to competitors?

It's definitely our focus on randomised control trials (RCTs). To my knowledge, we’re one of the few that build trials in the workplace. We specialise only in RCTs for evaluation, which is where we really distinguish ourselves as well as with our academic collaborations which are also a bit more rare among competitors.

7. What do you most enjoy about your role?

I love the variability day-to-day — it keeps things exciting. I also like that I can sit at the intersection of corporate and academia as I’m super keen on good research practices and fascinated by organisations. It feels so purposeful, useful and interesting. Seeing the impact of something you test is also such a fun thing to do. For example, when we get results in for an experiment it is initially quite nerve wracking and then when you find that it does actually work, then it's just unbelievable. I also have a wonderful team who I love working with. I'm at the office four days a week because I just really like hanging out with my coworkers. That makes an absolute world of the difference as well as working with some great people on client side as well.

8. Do you have a favourite project you can share?

One of my favourite projects was the first one published in MIT Sloan Management Review. It was pretty exciting for me to have my name on such a significant publication. We worked with Novartis to improve psychological safety through one-on-one meetings. We designed interventions with academics, randomly assigning 900 managers into different groups to test meeting guides. We found that psychological safety significantly improved in groups using an individual-focused meeting guide. It was one of the first proper large-scale, long-term projects that I did.

9. What does the team environment look like for a typical project?

On the client side, there's usually a project manager, data analyst, stakeholders, and a comms team—about 3-4 people per project. Internally, at MoreThanNow, we work in practices like organisational performance and social impact. I work with an associate who attends meetings and helps deliver projects. There’s also a lot of task sharing across teams, depending on experience. Typically, each project has a lead and one or two associates. We always ask each other for advice and ideas, because that works the best in terms of coming up with good interventions.

10. Are there any projects you’d love to work on but haven’t had the chance to yet?

I've been trying to work on an onboarding experiment for years. There’s a lot of research on making onboarding more inclusive and effective, and I’d love to explore that. I’d also like to test other types of interventions beyond emails—like pop-up messages or Teams chatbots, which we started experimenting with this year. Broadening the client base is also always exciting, as it means learning about completely new organisational cultures.

11. What would you recommend people focus on early in their career?

In the early stages, it’s all about absorbing as much as possible and finding what you enjoy. Behavioural science is a small field, allowing you to go in specific directions once you have the right skills. Initially, it might be hard to find a behavioural science role, but once you do, your specific skill set makes it easier to advance. Focus on developing skills that interest you and are useful — successful careers often lie at the intersection of passion and skill development. There are so many things you can do with behavioural science from organisational work and policy work to consumer work. The possibilities are literally endless. So I think it's just about carving out your niche.

12. What distinguishes someone applying for a role in your team?

This is quite generic, but look at the job ad and use those keywords in your CV. We get over a 100 CVs per role, and it often becomes a skimming exercise. We usually look for two main things in junior positions: technical expertise in RCT design and data analysis, the ability to handle large datasets, and as a distinguishing extra, interest in organisational behaviour. If someone has done relevant internships or has written a dissertation on the topic, it really makes them stand out.

13. Looking back to when you started, what advice would you give yourself?

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Starting a new job or course means there’s a lot of learning ahead, and it will happen — just enjoy the process. I’m impatient and often want to be great at everything right away, and I wish I didn’t stress too much about it. Learning and the development will come, you just have to look for the opportunities.

Thank you so much, Zsófi, for sharing your insights and advice with us today.