Anthym helps colleagues form workplace connections through music

Anthym, a platform for employees to connect through personal memories and music taste, launched its latest product to make the onboarding process feel more personable for new hires.

Dubbed “Welcome,” the offering expands Anthym’s music-based team connection experience, launched last year at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield. Employees create “JamTracks,” five songs that correlate to important memories in their lives, such as when they adopted their dog or lost a loved one. In this case, the hiring manager tasks a new hire to complete a JamTrack, which is then shared with the rest of the team, fostering a deeper connection between colleagues.

There’s also a ChatGPT-powered feature that generates employee user manuals for managers to get a sense of the new hire’s personality, communication style, core values and how they might relate with other team members. For instance, if you wrote “Married My Best Friend” as a favorite memory paired with the song “Marry Me” by Train, the AI tells the manager that you maintain strong relationships.

The user manual feature leverages proprietary large language models (LLMs), combining employee data and researcher data from Anthym’s group of scientific advisors — Dr. Elizabeth Margulis, a Princeton University professor in the Music Cognition Lab; Dr. Matthew Lieberman, director of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab; and Allen Romano, AI startup founder and former FSU professor.

“We take all that memory data and we tap into personality assessments, social cognitive neuroscience, music and cognition,” explained co-founder and COO Jeremy Gocke.

Gocke and Brian Mohr (CEO) founded Anthym when they discovered how many employees crave connection in the workplace. Forty-six percent of workers reported that working with people who don’t trust or care for each other was a reason for leaving their jobs, per McKinsey.

“Work life and personal life don’t intersect,” said Gocke. So, when the pandemic hit and people were at home on Zoom calls, Gocke and co-founder Brian Mohr (CEO) had an idea. “You can see my dog running [on the screen] and you can hear Brian’s kids yelling in the background. It made us more human… So, I said, ‘What if we did something where we took really important life moments, and we married it with music?’”

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While it may seem strange at first to share personal memories and favorite songs with peers, music has been linked to forming a sense of togetherness. (Similar to when fans bond with strangers at a concert.) Additionally, friendships in the workplace often lead to more collaboration and overall efficiency.

“Music is a huge unifier. It’s like a time machine,” Gocke added.

Welcome aims to solve the poor onboarding that so many workers experience, which, in turn, can cause low self-esteem, weak engagement and a heightened risk of quitting. According to Gallup’s “Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Journey for New Employees” report, inadequate onboarding and a low sense of belonging are the two main reasons for voluntary turnover in the first 90 days of employment.

Anthym’s new Welcome offering is officially available today. The company rolled out the product in beta a few months ago, touting 160 workshop clients. The annual subscription ranges from $1,200 to $6,000.