All the leaves are (turning) brown

All the leaves are (turning) brown

And so it’s October – that happened quickly. On the home front, our officially official adoption paperwork has been issued and we’re now “matching”. The adoption landscape in the UK is such that matching is facilitated by our social worker, meeting with the social workers of children whose care orders are in review, and between them establishing matches that they believe could lead to great outcomes for the children, and us as parents.?? The time spent in assessment with our social worker makes a world of sense now that we’re at this stage. She knows us very well, having spent lots of time with us, and so the outcomes that she’s able to envision for the children matched to be in our care are so much more real. It’s both an exciting and nail-biting time – lots of activity, but nothing certain enough to start finding furniture and colour schemes, or books, toys and clothes, let alone plans plans for sweeping change in our lives, as yet. Also – Autumn. At the end of summer, I managed to bruise ribs down the left of my torso, so as well as the changing of the leaves, I'm finally able to get back into the gym, thank goodness - lifting children is heavy work! I’m not a pumpkin spice kinda guy, but I do enjoy a good co-ordinated scarf and glove ensemble for those cold mornings! September certainly sped by, heading into some mornings calling for the scarf, we celebrated my husband’s birthday – he’s finally the same age as me, and I’m no longer tarred with the “older man” brush… for a few months at least, and included one of my favourite events of each year, the Insight222 Global Executive Retreat, this year at Duin en Kruidberg, outside Amsterdam.??

?Spending time with my team and 60+ of my domain peers, each of whom lead People Analytics teams of various size, with varied purposes, from being focussed on data and analytics product, through to leading people strategy through organisation design and strategic workforce planning, or beyond into deploying digital employee experience from the starting place of high quality and habitual data governance across the full range of people data in their organisations, is always a treat – this time as an employee of insight222, equally so. There’s a real sense of team and camaraderie amongst this group of executives, a genuine curiosity for each others work, and a shared sense of achievement in the way we, as a group, have shaped and supported our industry to change across the last decade. This year the group came together to share time and learn from Janine Vos , an inspirational CHRO and Management Board member at Rabobank, Prasad Setty , arguably one of the Godfathers of modern #peopleanalytics, the team from Duarte, Inc. , experts in influencing through story telling, and Erin Meyer , globally recognised expert in cross cultural leadership. Not to mention hearing from Jonathan Ferrar and Courtney McMahon as they shared first hand experiences of the way that our world has changed in the last year both across industry, and as a company has shifted the data literacy and evidence led capability of it's HR team.

My key takeaways from the sessions were, from Janine:

In order to influence the business agenda, as a people analytics leader we need to:

  • Understand the cross cultural needs of the leadership team, to ensure that everyone understands and is comfortable with recommendations
  • Meet your CHRO at their level of knowledge and comfort with data and help them to build maturity
  • Deliver to business outcomes, being articulate about which outcomes you’ve delivered to

To drive value we need to:

  • Clearly understand what business stakeholders consider to be value in their business, be it for financial, customer, or operational outcomes and
  • Understand that we are always pointed at creating more value for both the business and it’s people

There are “tricks” to building your influence and value creation like:

  • Prioritising understanding the culture of your leadership team and ensuring that you don’t work counterculturally
  • Always pairing the intent of your work and the impact that it has so that your storytelling is crisp and understood
  • Anticipate and prepare for the next question, to demonstrate your competence and build credibility.

?While Prasad shared a wealth of his experience and thoughts about where our industry will turn its attention to next, I especially liked the 4 Es framework that he introduced at Google to understand the value and impact of an intervention in HR.??

  • Effectiveness
  • Efficiency
  • Experience
  • Equity

An intervention could be driving an outcome in any of these. They are interchangeable in terms of importance, but the design of your intervention, and measurement of it needs to align to them as design principles. It reminded me of Dr. Jac Fitzenz ’s (1994) model for the measurement of human capital (https://www.amazon.co.uk/ROI-Human-Capital-Measuring-Performance/dp/0814413323) where he positioned that any idea in the human resources (or presumably any other) space could be measured in 5 categories,

  • Volume
  • Cost
  • Time
  • Quality
  • Satisfaction

Again, categories varying in importance based on the intervention. The consultant in me loves a good flexible model, and this one spoke to me as well. I also really enjoyed his presentation of the arc of value creation in the people analytics domain. Many of the models one interacts with in this space max out at delivering business outcomes, so I appreciated the extension in thinking that at the baseline, people analytics is used to optimise HR practices – underpinning a little bit, the core of Insight222’s mission, to put people analytics at the heart of business decisions. The next level speaks of maximising organisation health – stepping outside the realms of using analytics to change the way HR is delivered, to using it to understand the various ways humans interact with the overall performance of the organisation. At the pinnacle of this model though, is driving realisation of individual potential. I love the extension as it implies that people analytics teams have the opportunity to truly influence employee experience and outcomes by being central to the personalisation of intervention at scale, understanding the interaction between advancing capability of AI and human working relationships and enabling people to shine. He asked the question, as he closed – Is AI a toy, tool, threat or talent? It’s a compelling way to think about our attitudes to the changing world of work. Inspiring stuff.

?The Duarte team helped us to think through, and even plan out, how to influence decision makers with compelling story telling. Being crisp and clear with language, leveraging effective action oriented language to both connect with the stakeholder you need to make choices and drive them to trust in and engage with you to drive to the outcomes that you seek. In our domain, this can be hard! Being the person in the room with data and insights that can be contrary to the beliefs of a leadership team, or to the intent of an intervention, or indeed that could indicate through leading indicators, a possible shortfall against strategic outcomes is paramount. Very personally, I am looking forward to using some of the learning from Duarte as I build a website for my coaching practice… stay tuned for more on this!

Finally, we spent a half day with Dr Erin Meyer, someone I’ve admired for many years. The culture map, one of her famous works helps us to understand how different cultures are likely to engage with, or against each other, and how to navigate multi-cultural organisational landscapes to be the most effective one can be, accounting for all of those differences. Having been an Australian in the UK, where culture difference abounds, even though you’d expect it to be very similar, and then a British/Australian hybrid in Switzerland, where the difference goes well beyond language, Erin’s delivery felt a bit like a warm hug – she understand my lived experience, and gave some great examples of how I could behave in order to reduce friction in settings of multi-cultural communication. In a final slide, Erin shared where various cultures fit on the “comfort with silence” scale. My husband was not in the least surprised to learn that Australians (or at least this Australian) exist at the maximum discomfort end of the scale!

I’m feeling incredibly energised to get into Q4 after those 3 days of intense time spent with great friends and colleagues and learning from such inspiring experts. I’m ready to build websites, match with children and break into the autumnal and workout wardrobe, not to mention launching 3 new products at Insight222 aimed at supporting the organisation designers and workforce planners in out midst to get analytics led decision making about people strategy at the heart of the business as well!

Also, between now and when I’ll write next I’ll have watched Hocus Pocus with a live orchestra – an October must! Stay tuned.

Sebastian Kolberg

Leading People Analytics & Change Management to drive Digital Transformation and create business outcome - Be the Change that you want to see in the world

1 个月

Thank you

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