Priya Gill

Behavioural Science is a diverse and exciting field with many career paths to explore, from shaping policy in government units to applying research in corporate settings and advancing knowledge in academia. This series features insights from professionals and academics, highlighting both the opportunities in the field and their journeys to their roles. Today, we hear from Priya Gill.

Priya is a Senior Behavioural Science Associate at MoreThanNow, where she works under the social impact portfolio. She earned her Master’s from the London School of Economics in Behavioural Science with a specialism in Wellbeing, after studying Psychology and Economics at Harvard College.

How does your work help others or contribute to the world, and what motivated you to pursue this path?

The positive social impact of our work is what motivated me to pursue this path. I’m incredibly passionate about running randomized controlled trials to identify, recommend, and hopefully roll-out interventions that work to promote outcomes tied to well-being.

How does working at MoreThanNow differ from similar organizations?

I can’t claim to know what it’s like to work in other organizations, but I think what makes MoreThanNow unique is our emphasis on randomized controlled trials and purely data-backed recommendations. A lot of organizations in the behavioral science space apply nudges and frameworks uniformly across contexts. But the cornerstone of our work here is that context matters - which is why we have to experiment with behavioral levers based on an organization’s unique culture and the precise moment in question.

Could you describe a typical week in your job to give us a sense of what it’s really like?

Mondays and Fridays are ‘deep-work’ time - on Mondays I orient myself toward the week, mapping out project statuses and ensuring my inbox is cleared. I typically have some delivery work on Mondays - data analysis or intervention design or reporting decks. Tuesdays through Thursdays tend to involve more partner meetings - design discussions, launch logistics, results reporting, etc. And then Fridays are the only day I (and most of the team) work from home, and typically involve tying a bow on the week’s tasks and preparing myself for the following week. I should also mention that Mondays through Fridays I work 9am to 5:30 - I can count on my hand the number of times I’ve had to work beyond these hours.

What aspects of your work do you find most enjoyable or meaningful?

I admire my colleagues’ intellect and humility. In being who they are and approaching their work the way they do, my colleagues genuinely inspire me to be more curious and switched-on. I also find data analysis to be my ‘flow state’ - my team knows that as soon as I get a dataset, I become quite obsessed with preparing my code to identify patterns and make conclusions about behavioral phenomena underlying the numbers. As I become more senior in my career, I never want to forego the pleasure of working with big data.

What challenges do you face in your role?

Toeing the line between working at a researcher’s pace and a consultant’s pace. If we were operating on academia’s timelines, we would likely take months to analyze data and write up a report or paper. But because the advantage of working with MoreThanNow is that we replace context-agnostic ‘best practice’ consulting with context-focused, data-driven consulting, we abide by consulting’s timelines. What’s challenging is that we have to focus in on a handful of key insights, when we’d love to have more time acquainting ourselves with the data and identifying additional micro trends.

What skills or traits make you good at what you do?

I’m adaptable, a useful trait for a few reasons. I’m always happy to work on projects and tasks that aren’t part of my official role description. And as a small organization of trained behavioral scientists, it’s important that each of us is involved in the non-behavioral science parts of the business. So, for example, my colleague Gus has taken charge of how we organize ourselves around business development, my colleague Zsofi leads our data security practices, and I’m interested in standardizing processes like external communications, for example. Adaptability also helps in that because what we’re doing is pretty revolutionary, there is often pushback from client stakeholders that we weren’t necessary anticipating, meaning we have to adapt an intervention we’ve designed or adjust timelines. Being adaptable means there’s no place for ego - it’s not beneath me, or any of us, to venture outside of our official job description, and it’s not devastating to have to provide multiple iterations of a deliverable.

If you could choose your next project, what would you like to work on?

I would love to work on a project related to flexible work arrangements. Flexibility is inherently inclusive and the field evidence on it is lacking. And we’re living in a time where organizations are launching return-to-office policies, without evidence that mandating a certain number of days in the office drives the outcomes they care about like productivity and profit.

If a student or someone early in their career wants to end up working in your position or similar, what next step would most accelerate them in that path?

A critical qualification is formal training or experience in behavioral science. It’s the core of what we do. Also important are data analysis skills and a demonstrated appetite for the application of behavioral science to organizations. You may or may not have experience in the latter - but it matters that you’re excited about it!

If there’s one piece of advice you could give to your younger self or people in their early careers today, what would it be?

I’m happy that I took my time figuring out what I wanted to do, and landed on a subject matter, industry and organization that delights me every day. I’d advise others to truly and deeply reflect on what matters to them, and what they would consider a measure of success - work enjoyment? Work-life balance? Pay? And explore opportunities that get you closer to your measure of success and align with your values!

Thank you so much, Priya, for sharing your insights with us today