How to think about capturing value through People Analytics, bit by bit

Earlier this year I had the privilege of speaking to fellow Visier People users at a monthly practitioner user forum. Ultimately I'm glad that I did, but when the folks from Visier first reached out to invite me to do so, my initial response was to decline. The reason? The session's topic: quantifying value through people analytics.

Now to be clear, creating and capturing business value through better use of our people data is what we should all be striving for as people analytics and HR practitioners. But doing so, let alone communicating it to others, is much easier said than done. My company is still early enough in our people analytics journey, and there are many other folks in the field with much more experience than me, that I wasn't sure I wanted put myself out there quite yet.

Thankfully the folks at Visier clarified the intent of the topic, which made much more sense to me. The goal was to share thoughts on how to develop a framework to educate stakeholders on value being delivered. Now that I could do, as my company was right in the thick of growing our fledgling people analytics practice and contributions, and are constantly thinking about how to communicate that to our stakeholders.

So I thought to share those ideas with the broader LinkedIn community here, as those in the people analytics or overall HR space might still benefit, whether or not you use Visier.

Have a targeted focus

First, understand why your organization is undertaking a people analytics journey. There is a tangible investment of time and money in the team and technology, so it helps to be clear on why you're doing so in the first place. Is it more that you recognize a shortcoming in your capabilities, or is it driven by a specific problem you need to solve right now, such as reducing turnover, increasing diversity, etc.? 

If the reason is to build capability, once you have done so, your team needs to focus on identifying and solving a key business problem. Ultimately this is what folks whose title begins with a "C" care about. If you build out capability without demonstrating - even if only in small ways initially - how that capability can contribute to desired business outcomes, you're going to struggle to maintain momentum (and investment) in the long run.

If the reason is to address a specific problem, obviously you need to focus on that first. But in parallel, you should start identifying other areas that data can likely add value, and then be prepared to pivot once the initial concern is addressed. Otherwise the energy in your budding people analytics practice is going to deflate like an old balloon once you solve that initial problem.

But don't be too focused

One caveat to the idea of being highly focused on a value opportunity is to maintain some amount of time and capacity to pursue those ideas that nobody is asking for. Google made this concept popular with their "20% time" rule, allowing employees to pursue projects that they felt could be beneficial to the company. Many of those passion projects evolved into commercialized products we know today, such as Gmail.

In the people analytics space, this means digging through your data to find insights, and their associated problems, that people either aren't asking for solutions to, or may not even be aware that they exist. To be clear, I don't mean that you should randomly sift through your data without a purpose. Rather, it's often more about putting some attention to topics that people take for granted, don't realize that there is a potential issue, or don't think that people data can help address them.

The inspiration for many of these projects - which are a type of "specialty research" - can come from both internal and external sources. It could be an external research report or business news article - often citing a data-driven finding - that you decide to see if your company's data tells the same story. Or it could be common internal beliefs treated as fact - essentially cultural myths - that you decide to see if your data can validate them.

Recognize the intangibles

Think about what your organization can do now that it couldn’t do prior to undertaking your people analytics journey. Based upon where you are on the maturity scale, those intangibles may be different, but regardless of where you are, I suspect you've made some progress and built some capability that didn't exist before. That's "value."

If you've implemented a people analytics software solution, one intangible you've likely achieved is being able to do analyses - even simple ones - with a level of specificity or granularity you didn't have before. For example, being able to see the resignation rate for a very specific group of employees, rather than just for the top of company. Another intangible may be the ability to make those insights available to more people leaders in the organization through on-demand, self-service.

Intangible benefits often have inherent value in and of themselves, but they can sometimes get "lost." Once you've been using them enough, they just become part of the way you do things, and people can easily forget that life wasn't so good before. Don't let them forget.

Increase the speed to insight

Another piece of extreme intangible value is what others refer to as the "speed to insight." In the old school HR paradigm, leaders might be in a meeting discussing some topic when a great question came up. The HR analytics leader might say "That's a great question. We'll put the team on it and pull everyone back together to present findings of the analysis." Three weeks or so later, they do just that, and at the end of that presentation, the executive says "This is great! It makes me wonder..." which leads to a follow-on question. The HR analytics leader says "That's another great question. I'll put the team back on that." Two weeks later, they reconvene...

You see the problem here. Successive iterations of back-and-forth significantly draws out the time until everyone arrives at the real insight that matters. It's not uncommon that by that time, the insight has now become a moot point, or a newer, bigger problem has arisen.

In the new world of people analytics, a consistent and always available platform with a set of predefined data products and ad-hoc analysis capability drastically reduces this timeline. I can't tell you the number of times we've been in an HR leadership meeting, or even a 1:1 with our CHRO, when a question came up and we were able to spend just a minute or two digging into the data and answering it on the spot.

Upskill HR's data literacy

Once you've overcome the initial hurdle of implementing some kind of platform for your people analytics (hint: if you're primarily using Excel, that doesn't count; it's not a scalable platform), the primary challenges usually aren't technical. The real challenge is often the people. Do they have the skills to use the platform? Do they have the motivation? Beyond using it, are they analytically savvy enough just to make sense of the outputs? In other words, how good is their data literacy?

Here's one of those things that can get looked at as either a challenge, or an opportunity, depending on if you're a glass half full kind of person. While upskilling the data literacy of HR professionals can sometimes be a daunting undertaking, once the infrastructure of a people analytics platform is in place, it creates the impetus for your HR team to have to step up to the plate. A lack of organizational analytical capabilities is no longer an excuse for a lack of individual professionals being data-driven.

As we discussed at that practitioner user forum, the exact needs and methods of upskilling will vary by organization, but the central underlying theme is not to create a bunch of analysts, but rather to grow HR practitioners who can effectively ask questions of and think critically about the data.

Offer a tiered service

For most organizations, there is not capacity within the People Analytics team to provide a "white glove" level of support for all data consumers. Thinking back to the intangibles, however, creates a great opportunity to offer two (or more) different levels of service for your customers.

By leveraging the technology to create scalable, self-service data products that any people manager can access that are specified for their team, it frees up the capacity of your people analytics team. With that added capacity not spent on basic operational reporting or highly unique analytics requests from a single leader, they can now spend dedicate more effort to answering higher, value-add questions for your C-suite and select senior executives.

If you want to create a middle tier, look to create a network of "power users" out in the business who have broader access to data than a single people manager. If you can leverage employees who are analytically savvy, have some degree of influence, and who have their senior leader's trust, they can serve as a middle tier between the self-serve analytics that all people managers receive and the white glove approach that only senior executives get.

Approach it holistically

Finally, keep in perspective how people analytics fits into your overall business and HR strategies and data-driven decision making. An enterprise is an intertwined organism of processes, people, and technologies. Almost nothing truly exists in isolation. So take a step back and see how leveraging all of your different analytics tools and data together can help make the whole greater than the sum of their parts.