Examples of people analytics

- Let me give you a really inspirational example that I think will get you really excited about working in this space. So there's a bank in Canada that has lots and lots of remote branches, and so they're a retail bank, and they also have other businesses, and they found that in the retail bank, there is a fair amount of theft. People steal money, they steal cash, things disappear, and they found an unhappy, inconsistent pattern of theft, and somebody said we need to figure out why this is going on, and so a project was initiated, and it probably started in operations, to figure out what can we understand about patterns of theft in the company to reduce it? And of course, the initial reaction to most of these problems is let's do more training, and so they did a whole bunch of training. It didn't really matter. There seemed to be no correlation between the groups that did a lot of training and the groups that had a lot of loss, and so the people analytics group got involved, and they started to look at people-related data. Is it the tenure of the employees? Is it the management quality or the level of management or the type of management? Is there something about these people's background that we can use to understand why this is happening? You can imagine all the different directions this went. So they did a bunch of analysis, and they eventually came back to basic statistics of all the data we've captured. What seems to be the most highly correlated with theft? And sure enough, what they found is that the single most predictive driver of loss or theft in this bank was the number of miles between the branch office and the district supervisor, and they thought well that's interesting. What does that mean? Well it turns out, those branches don't get visited very often by the boss. They're left alone, and so the people in those branches start to get this feeling like you know what? Nobody's really paying attention to what we're doing, so we can bend the rules a little bit, and of course, once they understood that that was the problem, it was a really simple problem to solve. They just changed the rotation of branch managers, and they spend more time visiting these remote branches. They never would have known that. They could have spent millions of dollars on training and never would have moved that needle. That's an example, to me, of being operational focused on people analytics, doing projects that are meaningful to your company where you can add a huge amount of value, and there will be immediately results. So I leave you that example as inspiration for working in people analytics in general.