It’s been a highly analytical week at HiBob with our conversations around data and people analytics in full flow.
Our in-house data scientist, Adina Lederhendler, shared her top tips for getting started with People Analytics during a webinar on Tuesday and a panel of HR and insight experts (Nicola Millard, Luke Wilkins and Lauren Brown) took us through some real life examples of the impact data can have on a people function, during our panel discussion last night.
While presented in different formats the underlying message was very much the same, data insights are essential to an HR function – but only if you have a clear plan on what knowledge you want to gain from the data and what your end goal is.
Adina’s expertise looked at the varying ways data can be collected, starting with sophisticated HR systems (such as HiBob) and going right through to the most basic new starter forms.
One of the other essential factors in getting started with people analytics that was discussed, was identifying the business areas or challenges you want to know more about, and possibly improve – then collecting relevant data to decide whether a change should be made, and what that change should be. Examples of which can be seen in Adina’s slides above.
As the week progressed, so did the analytics discussion and the breadth of the topic. Our panel event took Adina’s incredible introduction one step further, focusing on the use of people data in real life situation.
Luke Wilkins, HR Director for Gett UK and winner of Reward Strategies HR Leader of the year award, shared the following advice for using HR analytics to make an impact on the C-Suite and get their buy in for future investment;
‘Make use of the data you already have to really understand your cost of recruitment and cost of staff turnover. Present those numbers to the board and be brave enough to experiment with projects that stand to make a real difference in this area’.
Dr Nicola Millard, Head of employee and customer insights, and resident psychologist at BT, talked about how they made a decision to place equal importance on collecting customer and employee satisfaction data. The Net Easy Score was originally introduced to discover how easy customers found working with BT and was quickly followed up with The Employee Easy score when data showed a strong correlation between staff retention and customer satisfaction.
Nicola also discussed a concern that’s becoming more common, with people fearing the possibility of advanced AI technologies making their jobs redundant. She said;
‘If a process has rules and data, it can probably be automated – but data on its own isn’t always sensible or relatable, for instance an Amazon recruitment algorithm stopped recruiting women as not enough senior Amazon employees were female for it register as an attractive attribute, so you will always need a human element of data analysis’
Lauren Brown, People Lead at Tech Nation shared her experience of enhancing engagement through data within the startup world by championing the use of engagement surveys and making change management a company-wide responsibility she said;
‘Making a change to an HR process can’t just be the responsibility of the HR team – you need to find a ‘People champion’ in each department, including the C-Suite, to secure full engagement and timely implementation’
The quality and quantity of top-level advice and content we have been privileged enough to experience this week, has not only proven we are on the right track with our Bob development efforts in the human resource metrics area but has inspired to create an entire series of People Analytics guides that we look forward to sharing with you soon.