30 Lessons in 30 Days - 3 ways to use Analytics for Talent Optimisation

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Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson decided to go on a camping trip. After dinner and a bottle of wine, pitched their tent under the stars, and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend, "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see."

Watson replied, "I see millions of stars."

"What does that tell you?"

Watson pondered for a minute,"Well, among the millions of stars, it's quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life."

Holmes paused for a few seconds, then spoke: "Watson, you idiot. It means that someone has stolen our tent!"

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Sometimes in life, overthinking might not always be a good thing. I'm sure you've heard of the phrase "Paralysis from Over-analysis". Other times, spending a bit of time might save you a lot of heartache later on. At an organisation level, here are a few areas that might warrant some of our attention:

1. Employee turnover analytics

Employee turnover analytics refer the process of studying data related to employee satisfaction and turnover rates, to improve future statistics in this area.

Hiring employees, training them and then integrating them into the business costs us time, effort and money. High employee turnover is disruptive to the remaining team members (Who is going to take over her job? What? Me? On the same pay? Thank you very much I'll quit as well.) and leads to drops in morale and staff productivity.

Hiring fast and losing employees also translates to a low return on investment. Organisation with high turnover rates do not have the chance of reaping the benefits of employees who are at the performing stage. The resources and attention spent on hiring and training could also be channeled to other areas of the business. Research in this area by companies such as DBS has predicted massive savings by cutting down employee turnover rates.

There are several ways to do this.

• Perform trend analysis on lagging indicators such as employee turnover rates.
• Be proactive in collecting leading indicators such as employee engagement levels and staff advocacy score.
• Bench marking our scores against industry standards. It is normal for some industries to have a higher turnover rate that others. Do not take the data at face value.

Tips and Suggestions

• Avoid relying on one source of data, as there could be many reasons behind an employee's departure. What is important is that we do not lose good employees for the wrong reasons.
• Information from exit interviews should be reviewed with caution. Emotionally intelligent employees wouldn't want to burn the bridge with their former employers, and might provide generic answers such as "I want a new challenge". However, supplementing this with the regular 360 degree and the employee's social media postings might paint a disastrous relationship with a superior that was not addressed in time.
• Similar to performance management, employee climate surveys should not be become an annual exercise 'just for the sake of doing it'. Check-ins at regular intervals allow us to take preventive action instead of corrective action. And that is the name of the game.
• As Herzberg highlighted in his research, do not confuse engagement with dissatisfaction. A person who do not display dissatisfaction with his/her current pay is not necessarily engaged at work. Employee engagement is influenced by many variables, and similarly, the decision to leave an organisation could be result of several factors as well.

2. Capability analytics

Capability analytics refers to the deliberate process of identifying the capabilities or core competencies we want/need in our business.

To do this, we need to analyse our current staff members to determine what are the capabilities we have (AS-IS). The we need to spend time thinking about the capabilities (skills/knowledge) that we need to develop to handle foreseeable future challenges and achieve our goals (TO-BE). Lastly, we can determine if there are any capability gaps that requires us to intervene.

Without this process, we will be hiring new employees without knowing exactly what competencies we require, resulting in hiring decisions based on gut instinct of the interviewer/hiring manager, which is very dangerous indeed, given the amount of research done on possible biases that may occur during the interview.

Capability analytics helps to avoid this scenario, and zoom into specific capabilities such as 'capability in Hadoop" or 'advanced Python programming' , rather than using generic candidate characteristics’ such as ‘honesty’, ‘good at communication’ or 'team player'. You know what I mean.

Other than painting a clear picture of requirements for recruitment purposes, the results of Capability Analysis can point us towards the additional training that we need to provide our existing staff. This deliberate process prevents us from being blindsided by the ever changing VUCA business environment. For example, in the L&D industry, the Covid-19 pandemic has propelled competency in virtual facilitation to must-have skillset.

Tips and Suggestions

• Beware of over-emphasising on paper qualifications. To excel at the workplace, employees also need capabilities that may not be formally recognised, such as ability to work well with others.
• For current employees whose skill set is decreasing in relevance, consider retraining rather than replacement. Years in the company and accumulated domain knowledge is hard to account for, but valuable nonetheless. For larger companies, reassignment to other roles might also be a viable option.

3. Leadership analytics

Leadership analytics refers to the study of leadership effectiveness for our business. Organisations with poor leadership often face difficulties in achieving results and fulfilling its potential.

To do this, establish a system of regular 360-degree feedback surveys of our employees. This allows us to find out how a few important pieces of information:

• how employees feel about their current leaders.
• what leadership style/attributes would be the most suitable for our organisation culture
• which one among our current employee has the leadership potential to move up to the next level.
• what are some challenges faced by new leaders

Tips and Suggestions

• Make the data collection process anonymous to create a comfortable environment for the employees to open up. I had a client once, who was fuming at the 'verbatim' negative feedback given by some of his senior leaders with regards to his leadership, and demanded the raw data from me, so that he could pinpoint the source of the comments, highlighting that the scores was totally different from the previous ones conducted by another vendor, which was not done anonymously. I respectfully declined his request to uphold my professional ethics and standards. Unfortunately, that assignment resulted in a bad debt. Leaders, be prepared to face the results. The results of these surveys are moments of truth, and not instruments to pander to our narcissistic needs.
• Good leaders tend to demonstrate similarities in personality traits or characteristics. By leveraging on a validated personality profiling tool, it is possible to understand the personality traits required to excel in certain roles. These insights can then be used to supplement our training and recruitment efforts.
• In this current day and age, there is no such thing as one size fits all. All organisations are unique, with their own corporate culture, challenges and business rules. It is always recommended to create our own model based on our experience of the leadership characteristics that has proven to be effective, as well as those traits which we value.

Talent Optimisation

The war for talent has already started. Organisations that excels tend to have a good system of "Raise, Train and Sustain". The analytics listed above will provide great insights on achieving our goals. Good luck.

Weixi Tan helps clients to implement impactful change initiatives by addressing the human side of change through the use of psychometrics such as Workplace Big 5 and Strength Deployment Inventory. He also facilitates sessions using award winning online simulations that highlights important principles of change management. All interventions can be conducted in a virtual instructor led environment. He can be contacted at [email protected].