Conference review: Wharton People Analytics Conference 2019, Philadelphia

It was a great event to see and feel the contemporary trends in both HR practices and academic researches. I was surprised to learn that far more analytic methods and techniques, were already accessible in the market than I had expected. The conundrum that we, HR practitioners, are facing now would be how to ensure proper data infrastructure and ecosystem to extract, transfer and analyze the people related data and to acquire essential competencies to comprehend and validate the results manufactured by algorithms. As Adam Grant expressed in his speech at the conference wrap-up, new ideas and practices of people analytics are impressive but it is worrisome for them to be ahead of the science. It was few who shared the empirical evidence or scientific findings on how the people analytics practice had helped HR to add more values to the business success.

How to apply people analytics to the topic of diversity and inclusion (D&I) was a dominant theme in the conference. Given the topic is often demonstrated with numerical representation figures such as proportion of female executives, it is very understandable that people analytics experts salivate to demonstrate ingenious cases. It was very impressive to see the attempt to dive into the fundamental causes why the organization had come along up with the still-low share of female executives. In particular, ONA (Organizational Network Analysis) was the most interesting approach linking to the D&I in a sense that it illuminated behavioral differences in professional network management between genders and hypothesized that appropriate collaboration or network behaviors would have helped succeed individual careers.

Next to the D&I improvement by people analytics, measuring and improving team productivity by the analytics also caught my eyes. Indeed, it is very relevant to contemporary organizational transformation from hierarchical and common-and-control management to flat and autonomous organization. Many anecdotal evidence tell, including my own case, HR struggles from how to prove the efficacy of self-organization in agile context. Especially, the case sharing of GM was interesting. They modeled the effective ingredients to build innovative teams in disruptive environments. By means of ONA techniques, they identified influencers and right team members in a way to improve the team productivity. Moreover, during a side-talk with Cade Massey, I got to know that Google had already initiated an experimental project to identify catalysts for team productivity. It was the Project Aristotle in 2012 with a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". The goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”

Applying analytics to employee skill development was also interesting to learn. IBM’s case sharing motivated me to ponder for the similar application in my organization. IBM named it as “Domino Reskilling: Sequential Retraining That Minimizes Time to Meet Demand” with the purpose to answer the question who can learn the new skills the fastest. With the very appealing purpose- reskilling the right person inside over external staffing for cost-efficient strategic skill readiness and employee engagement- they had laid out analytical methods to visualize skill similarity or adjacency between existing skills and new strategic skills. It makes sense that we can reduce elapsed time and consumed costs to acquire the new skills if we train those who already have used the similar skills to date. I think, this topic will catch the eyes of the high tech companies that have substantially suffered from the pressure of high velocity of employee reskilling to IoT related skill sets.

All in all, the learning agenda, case sharing and network opportunities were helpful to have an overview of current trends. Moreover, I could witness the prominent solutions of some start-ups and IT solution leaders in the exhibition. Especially, following were impressive: Humu- an employee behavior change solution provider by using an effective combination between organizational psychology- Nudge- and analytics; Microsoft Workplace Analytics- an integrative solution providing a dynamic view into how organization function and visualize opportunities for improvements; Peakon- a platform for measuring and improving employee engagement; Mercer Internal Labor Market solution serving various descriptive and predictive information; PayAnalytics- a solution to spot out internal pay gaps by comparing with internal peer group by algorithms. 

I should not miss the fantastic statement from Geoffrey Garret, dean of Wharton School in his opening speech: “Organizations flourish when the people in flourish. Let’s use science for it”. I think it implies a meaningful message behind the word of 'science'. My point of view, people analytics is not science yet but statistical visualization for now. It will be able to be science through scientific proving. Thus I believe organizational psychology would be soon a key competency to the HR practitioners to be specialized in people analytics. Indeed, it will be a way more difficult to get it than mathematics and statistics.