Demystifying People Analytics: Part III

In the previous article, we spoke about a few general use-cases to get started on the analytics journey. In this article, we will discuss three unique problems and how the organizations approached those using Analytics.

1) Organization: Google, a multinational technology company

Problem Statement: Does manager Quality have an impact on the performance of their team members?

Situation: Google was facing resistance from its engineers towards managers as they considered them redundant. A similar situation had happened in 2002. Google, then created a flat organization. However, it did not work. So, this time around, instead of directly jumping at the solution, it made sense to investigate the issue.

Approach: They hired a team of statisticians. The initial hypothesis they formed: “manager quality does not have an impact on the performance".

To first understand the impact on performance the concept of manager quality needs to be appropriately defined and they did this by collecting multi-year data through various means, performance appraisals, employee surveys, interviews, etc. Managers from Google’s three major functions (engineering, global business, and general and administrative) from across the geographies participated.  

They were asked qualitative questions on whether they have development discussions with their employees and if they have a vision for the team. The main idea was to identify what differentiates good managers from bad and analyze the impact on team performance. The insight that they eventually got was that having a good manager does have an impact on performance.

This exercise did three things

• Google established that it cares for its employees and takes feedback seriously 
• It addressed the apathy that engineers felt towards managers by giving them data-backed evidence thus creating a more cohesive environment
• Google created a guide-map on exactly what to look for in a manager and how to redesign the organization for efficiency and effectiveness. 

The design that Google came up with in 2013 comprised 37,000 employees: just 5,000 managers, 1,000 directors, and 100 vice presidents.  

This initiative was called Project Oxygen and it has grown into a comprehensive program that measures key management behaviors and cultivates them through communication and training.

2) Organization: Chevron - A multinational leader in energy and oil

Problem Statement: To maximizee profits and revenue per employee 

Situation: The need to maintain above-average profitability in the economic landscape of falling oil prices

Approach: R J Minor, Head of Talent Analytics, redefined the organization’s mission as “informing and supporting business strategy” through people and HR data to solve critical business problems and to provide unique insights. They redesigned their traditional decentralized reporting mechanism and transformed it into an evolved global process prioritizing data-driven business decisions. This new model operates at a lower cost yet 30% higher productivity.

The core analytics team designed customized country-specific attrition models that could predict future talent supply and demand across its different business locations. These models could predict outputs with 85% accuracy considering various business performance drivers and the talent requirement.

Organization: Cisco, A worldwide leader in IT & Networking

Problem Statement: How to create personalized work experiences for employees and at the same time provide leaders with agility to do talent planning.

Situation: Cisco intended to utilize every employee’s potential and channelize it to drive greater revenue, productivity, and more engagement.

Approach: Cisco decided to create an internal talent marketplace, Talent Cloud.

Every employee can assess their competencies and skills against roles and also, choose the career path and learning goals. The same information is also available to others in the talent eco-system and managers can recommend development opportunities. The system is built such that it notifies of the correct role and skill matches to managers as well. They are also building a “reputational index”, a feedback mechanism that captures the experience of working with each other on projects. An inbuilt evidence-backed and real-time 360-degree feedback on performance and behaviors.

The examples discussed above are just a few cases where some pressing issues were addressed using analytics. Data in itself is function agnostic, the real takeaway from these examples is that one can pick up any area, find linkages with the business strategy and identify if a more data-driven approach will benefit the cause.

In the last part of this series, we will discuss a few more use cases. We will also discuss some recommended models to incorporate People Analytics as a part of the HR strategy.

References:

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1635&context=honorstheses

https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management

https://blog.perceptyx.com/the-five-pillars-of-business-aligned-people-analytics-for-covid-19-and-beyond

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2017/people-analytics-in-hr.html

https://deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2015/12/03/10-things-we-know-about-people-analytics/?mod=Deloitte_cio_relatedcontent

https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/talent-analytics/2017/3-ways-data-shapes-the-talent-strategy-at-tesla-chevron-and-linkedin

https://www.analyticsinhr.com/blog/hr-analytics-case-studies/?utm_source=resources&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=case-studies&utm_content=people-analytics-case-study-collection.