Justin M. Yurkovich is a People Data Scientist at Workhuman, where he researches and measures workforce behavior in the context of employee recognition behaviors from over 7.5 million global users. He holds a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from The University of Nebraska-Omaha and an MA in I/O from The University of Northern Iowa. His research includes drivers of employee engagement, the role direct managers and teammates play in creating a culture of recognition and how that is reflected in traditional engagement surveys. He investigates the relationships between constructs like engagement and psychological safety and how they are tied to recognition behaviors and objective outcomes like safety incidents. His current research is leveraging LLMS and classifier models to explore the ways linguistic characteristics of award messages reflect both organizational values and KSAOs to help guide organizational efforts in support of higher-level priorities.
