Key Takeaway #1: Businesses under-invest in people analytics.
- Brittany Call, Director of People Operations at Lucid Software: “The biggest challenge today is HR capacity. It would be really easy for the group to lose sight of core responsibility. Don’t let the size of the team slow you down. Find analytics business partners that can enable your success and drive towards broader business outcomes.”
- Phylicia Jones, Director of Global Talent Development at PagerDuty: “If you’re starting a function or building a new program, you have to think of data as a friend. You can’t put out a program for a program’s sake. You’ll just introduce noise into the conversation.”
- Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO at Crosschq: “Connect people data with business outcomes or you won’t get the investment you need from leadership when budgets are limited.”
Key Takeaway #2: Crawl, walk, run. Establish baseline metrics before you work through advanced analytics.
- Tomas Vieria, Strategic Planning & Analytics Project Manager at Farfetch: “People ops works with a cross functional team including analytics to garner all the resources necessary to build out a people analytics program. As the business and data shifts, this allows us to stay agile as we need to source new skills. We’ve seen this because of the pandemic, a shift in what data needs to be reported and analyzed, and new ways to distribute that data.”
- Janet Lockhart-Jones, Leadership Coach at Torch: “People don’t understand the relationship of coaching and development to performance. You have to connect the data, pre-hire to post-hire performance. Training engagement to the growth of the individuals. Coaching and the correlation to job satisfaction. How does the performance of those being coached compare to those that are not? Find out what’s working, what’s engaging, and what’s the business benefit. the impact of each needs to be measured.”
- Phylicia Jones: “Streamline tooling. Find the platforms that work the best, that are easiest to use, and think about the systems that support the metrics you want to monitor and improve, and focus on those.”
Key Takeaway #3: Candidate and employee experience are core KPI.
- Brittany Call: “Onboarding surveys, even if done simply through google forms, are a good way to get started. If you want to provide an amazing experience you have to get feedback from your internal customers. Follow that up with week 1 surveys, 30 and 90 day surveys. This allows us to continually tweak the processes that service our employees.”
- Phylicia Jones: “Candidate and employee NPS are paramount in determining the engagement of a program; the effectiveness is an output of that engagement. Be prepared to pivot if your audience isn’t buying in.”
Key Takeaway #4: If DEI analytics aren’t part of people analytics, they need to be. Now.
- Janet Lockhart-Jones: “Businesses need to really get serious about diversity, equity and inclusion. Have targets, measure against your goals. You can’t hide behind a lack of analytics anymore.”
- Mike Fitzsimmons: “A diversity scorecard can be simple to create. much of the data you need is already there. And the other data, you can’t be afraid to ask your employees for it.”
Key Takeaway #5: Prepared to unlearn what you think you know about your own people data.
- Mike Fitzsimmons: “4 out of 5 TA (talent acquisition/recruiting) team members do not believe the quality of the hire they make is their responsibility.
- Lockhart-Jones: “The most important relationship for employees is their relationship with their direct supervisor, and it doesn’t get enough focus.”
- Phylicia Jones: “Analytics show managers who went through L&D (learning and development) programs haven’t had effect on their engagement. What we found is driving engagement is physical proximity to manager.”
- Tomas Vieria: “Double down on internal mobility as those that move internally are the best performers.”
- Brittany Call: “Our work from home engagement survey found that technical groups that have traditionally asked for more quiet time to work now feel less productive while working remote.”