How to get started with people analytics

(mellow music) - So, one of the questions you're probably asking is, how do I get started in this? And I would say there's a couple of things. If you're a relatively small company, or you don't have a dedicated team or a dedicated person, rather than sit around and sort of academically figure out what you think would be an interesting problem to work on, start with your business leaders, start with the line managers, start with the CEO, and ask them, what are the two or three biggest issues you think we have in the company related to people? And let me go back and come up with a plan to study that problem. Now, you go back and look at the data you have. Do you have any data on that issue? Do you have turnover data, do you have performance data? Chances are, you do. If you can do one project where you can go to either your CHRO, or your CEO, or whoever your business counterpart is, and show them that the data that you have is useful to make better decisions, you're going to be able to go back and ask for more money, for more staff, for more tools, for more sophisticated analysis. Now, that all said, a lot of you probably work in bigger companies where you already have a lot of this data. So then, the problem is usually building an integrated team that can look at the many sources of data you're already collecting. Because what usually happens in bigger companies is, there is an analytics group that's just doing employee surveys. There's another analytics group that's just looking at return on investment for training. There's another analytics group that's looking at recruiting, advertising spend, candidate experience. While all of those are great groups to have and they're all doing important work, a lot of the business problems cross those lines. And so, if you're in a larger organization, the best way to get started is to bring those groups together and start working on projects that you know are essential to the organization. The other thing I would say about getting started is that you're probably going to find that a lot of the data you have, as interesting as it is, is not that accurate, it's not that clean, it's not that complete. And so, early on in your journey into studying the data about your organization, your people, you have to spend some time, internally in HR and with the IT department, making sure the data is really high quality. A lot of the data that's collected in HR is entered by line managers or recruiters, or people in the HR department. It's entered incorrectly, it's out of date. I mean, part of your getting started process is to make sure you have a high quality source of data that is trusted. Again, if you don't do that, and you do all the analysis, and you come up with all sorts of great charts and graphs on what this all means, and then the business people start poking holes and find out that the data's not accurate, you're going to lose your credibility for a long time. Unfortunately, you have to make a business case to your sponsors, whether they be the head of HR, the head of the business, that you must do that, and that it will take time and it will cost money before you do the fancy analysis. And I think there's a natural tendency for business people to say, "Well, go get me the answer "to this question and go find the data," and they send you off on a wild goose chase to go find accurate data, and you find out it's really, really hard to get it. And so, I think it's really important to make a business case to your sponsors that we have to spend three months, six months, a year, whatever it is, creating a reliable, integrated database first, and then we can do all this analysis. I have proven statistically through research that the companies that don't do the core investment first, often times underperform later. So, that's part of getting started, too.