How People Analytics helps to empower and manage tech teams?
What if I am not going to get this thing right, I feel so lost at the moment.
“Excuse me, what do you mean?” — asked my dear friend
I am starting to get friction in my team, they are all amazing and talented people, but there is something which is just not clicking here. They are all diverse, have different strengths, specialties, growth, and career paths. I don’t want to lead them based on opinions and instincts, I feel like something is missing. I am struggling to surf the wave, keep a cohesive and empowered team. This issue also keeps me up at night.
“You care about them, I am pretty sure you will find a good solution to this. Have you tried to look into other areas where you can find a good example?”
Hmmm not sure at the moment, I need to walk around with open eyes, anyway, what do you think, is the Toronto Raptors really going to win the championship in the NBA this year?
“Well, Kawhi Leonard is averaging nearly 30 points and 10 rebounds in the playoffs, shooting nearly 40 percent from the field, and let’s not forget he is a lockdown defender with over 2 steals per game. With their backcourt, they have all the pieces together to become champions.”
I wish I could say this about the people I work with.
“You mean that they are going to become champions?”- my friend laughed
No, I mean to specifically know in which areas the teams excel and where I need to support them, based on data. My work is always based on data, research, statistics and here I am, blind when I want to see data about my teams.
See, — I continued, when I was little, I collected a lot of basketball player cards, it was so nice, they listed all the relevant statistics from the particular player and some behind the scene information.
“What if you had a card of each person on the team, you could find out how can you support them the best”
This was the conversation I had with my friend last year, which set me off researching and finding ways, how statistics and data can be applied to cross-functional teams and people management. I was not even aware of what a nugget of gold I found and it was my task to unpolish it in the upcoming months.
Using people analytics for better decisions and talent management.
Identifying, developing, attracting, and retaining top talent can be dramatically improved when organizations use people analytics. Sadly so many organizations are still making talent-based decisions on their instincts and intuition. From defining the position duties all the way to hiring and retaining human capital, the hiring managers, C-level, and mid-level managers facing talent management decisions are tapping in the dark. Without reliable data, organizations will lose on data-driven decision making and identifying break out opportunities for individual team members.
The key to establishing stable and solid foundations, especially valid for tech teams, is the ability to:
- Identify high performers — as individuals and collectively as a team
- Streamline the hiring process and diversify talent
- Adjust compensation plans based on benchmarks
- Linking human capital to business impact
- Identify skills, career paths, breakout opportunities and grow team members
- Develop talent and team development programs
- Track and monitor team health on an organization-wide platform
Identify High Performers — as individuals and collectively as a team
Using people analytics, leadership teams have the ability to uncover those unique factors which are highly influencing organization-wide performance. Not only that, but people analytics will also help to allocate the right talent to the right role and enable cross-functional teams to be fully empowered. Using data and the underlying insights will lead to better decision making, execute talent management strategies, improve employee retainment percentage, streamline the hiring pipeline, and address individual performance gaps.
Streamline the hiring process and diversify talent
Using people analytics will allow leaders to build on individual and team strengths and hire the right talent to gain a dramatic increase in team performance by finding the right talent with the much-needed skill-sets. Evaluating candidates early on, based on data-driven processes and evaluation steps will result in a faster and better hiring decision. Evaluating candidates on their skills, characteristics, personality, career path, and growth opportunities will lead to identifying the right talent and at the same time establish a solid foundation of an industry-wide benchmark.
Adjust compensation plans based on benchmark analytics
People analytics is an excellent way to harness professional data during the hiring period. It allows hiring managers to tap into the new potential, compare the workforce with the competition, and simply identify what top talent for a key position would look like.
Linking human capital to business impact
When using the right analytics, linking top talent with the required business value helps business leaders to allocate existing and new workforce to deliver the biggest impact and solve challenges.
Review skills, career paths, breakout opportunities and grow team members
Using people analytics will make skills assessment, workforce interest, employee growth, personality type evaluation, team fit, and promotion opportunities data-driven and measurable. Beyond the data, it helps individuals to focus on specific areas and offers opportunities to close the gaps.
Develop talent and team development programs
Organizations investing in human capital will need short, mid, and long term strategies to develop core competencies for its people. Using people analytics will provide data to determine which competencies can be acquired through coaching, training programs, project-based learnings, or assigning the right mentors. Empowered and highly competent cross-functional teams will automatically bring the organization to a new level.
Track and monitor team health on an organization-wide platform
People analytics will support organizations and their human capital by lowering employee turnaround, keeping team members highly motivated, and unlocking untapped potential thus leading to a better work environment. A healthy environment will encourage each team member to deliver their best effort and it also allows them to be capable of reaching business objectives.
Finding the right balance
Organizations that are focusing on their customers and solving real business issues heavily rely on their human capital. Unfortunately, employees will not strive in their work environment just because the company offers ping-pong tables, gaming afternoons, pizza nights, or cool beverages.
Micromanagement, long lead time, the inability of decision making, shared ownership, lack of growth opportunities, bad relationships are all putting a burden on human capital. As digital transformation is sweeping the landscape the need for a highly capable digital workforce is exponentially increasing.
Organizations that are not capable of developing the right culture will constantly face high employee turnover as most human capital decisions will remain instinct-based and losing a key person will hurt the business and destroy good team-dynamics.
As technology changes usually in 2–3 years, digital human capital is in need of strong and focused leadership, supporting continuous learning and allowing cross-functional teams to take full ownership.
It’s not rare that people working in the tech field receive up to 5 inquiries in a month to change their position for better compensation. Therefore, finding the right balance, between human capital retention, reaching business objectives, offering perks, and at the same time became data-driven is more than critical for most organizations.
In the 21-th century organizations are slowly or rapidly, but all becoming digital, except those who cannot keep up with the required changes. Organizations that are not, or just barely taking calculated risks to transform themselves and become digital and data-driven will be left behind and in many cases driven out of the business. Applying people analytics is not a single key to success, however, it increases the capabilities.
Industry-leading enterprises as well as innovative startups are all having one in common. The need for highly capable tech people and retaining them in the long run.
Assessing individual team members.
In the tech field, cross-functional teams usually contain key stakeholders, product owners/managers, product designers, UX-researchers, front and back end engineers, QA, and dev-ops engineers. The number of people on the team can vary between 2–12 people while a healthy balance remains between 6 and 8 people. In some organizations agile coaches, team leads, management members, and specialists are supporting the team as well. Assessing individual capabilities within the team will reveal team capabilities automatically.
The key-pillars of People Analytics.
- Behavioral Assessment
- Knowledge-based assessment
- Process and Techniques assessment
- People Skills and Responsibilities assessment
- Technical Skills assessment
- Key activities — performance assessment
- Team Fit assessment
- Development assessment
- Promotion opportunity assessment
Behavioral Assessment
The assessment of each element of judgment, communication, courage, the discipline of an individual’s behavior will help leaders and individuals to clearly see strengths and opportunities for growth. Assessing an individual’s behavior is a continuous process, based on specific actions and feedback. To be able to gather the most accurate data, self, peer, and management level assessment will provide the most accurate information. Using specific situations and providing behavior related feedback can be established within a few minutes after a meeting or presentation. Leaders encouraging feedback, both positive and negative will see a dramatic improvement in the team and individual performance. It will provide transparency, and helps every member to understand how certain actions were welcomed.
Providing continuous feedback which is focusing on developing a person, will leverage already in the short term. Evaluating new candidates for a role in the behavioral-based assessment will allow hiring managers and team members to make better decisions on hiring the right candidate.
Knowledge-based assessment
Cross-functional team members must have some expertise and knowledge about their customers, internal processes, industry, or operations. Assessing knowledge-based skills will quickly reveal if the organization is investing enough time and training for its employees to understand how internal business units are functioning, what are the key restrictions or opportunities, and where the industry is currently moving. Without deep knowledge, cross-functional team members will be unable to function properly. Evaluating candidates on knowledge will quickly highlight the investment required to bring them up to the required standard.
Process and Techniques assessment
Each role demands different processes and techniques to master in order to create outstanding digital products. Self-functioning and highly empowered cross-functional teams demand that each team member have the ability and knowledge on the discovery, optimizing experience, steps to take in order to prepare, build and deliver software components and how changes will affect the underlying business units. With the assessment, business leaders and team members will have a transparent picture of which areas to focus on in order to deliver the biggest impact and connect to business value. Gathering information from candidates about their knowledge of processes and techniques will help to filter the right candidates.
People skills and responsibilities assessment
Human capital, working in the tech field needs not only to have exceptional hard but at the same time great soft skills. Team leaders to fully support their teams need to ensure that collaboration within the team and handling business partners or stakeholders in the right way are in place. Evaluating candidates on their soft skills will reduce the risk of hiring a candidate with strong hard skills who would struggle to cooperate with team members, business unit leaders, or key business partners.
Technical Skills assessment
Highly capable cross-functional teams are relying on exceptional technical skills. Each member of the cross-functional team should possess strong technical skills in order to deliver outstanding products. Finding out which areas individuals are striving and where they need to close the gap can make a difference in being capable to deliver exceptional user experience with the underlying technology to fuel business to grow. When candidates are evaluated during the initial phases, the results will provide great insights to make data-driven decisions as well as hiring for team needs.
Key activities — performance assessment
As cross-functional teams become more and more self-organized and continuously deliver new software components, evaluating their key activities will provide guidance for leaders to determine current or future compensation plans. Evaluating key activities will also provide great insights for leaders who would be able to focus on removing the required roadblocks for the team in order to enable them to deliver value. When evaluating candidates on their past experience and understanding their key activities, it will support decision making on how to properly link candidates to business value.
Team Fit assessment
Individuals within an organization are highly dependent on each other, especially when they are forming a cross-functional team that is on the mission to solve business or technical issues. Assessing the relationships within the team and outside the team will provide information both for individuals and leadership members to support and maintain a healthy environment. Understanding how candidates would adapt and bring value to their future team will provide exceptional information to influence decision making.
Development assessment
Providing a path for individuals to reach the next level and becoming better to sharpen their current skill-set will influence the strategy on how HR and leadership should prepare the right development program. People’s ability and motivation on learning and acquiring new skills are one of the key elements to ensure a long term and healthy environment both for the front line workforce and C or mid-level management. Candidate evaluation on their ability and motivation will provide great guidance for the hiring team to determine if the candidate will be able to advance through the years.
Promotion assessment
Organizations that are not having multiple career paths are going to face sooner or later a higher employee turnover. Understanding the individuals and their career path will enable HR and the team leads to project for short, mid, and long term hiring needs. Ideally, diverse teams will contain people with different skill-sets and different individual paths. Assessing individuals and learning, who would be a great team lead, mentor or specialist will provide an opportunity for small and large organizations to prepare multiple career programs and compensation plans. At the same time when assessing candidates for the position, the results will support decision-makers to identify future opportunities for the new team member.
Organizations focusing on becoming-data driven and competing in the digital field have been and will be relying on exceptional human capital. The cost of acquiring new talent is exponentially higher than retaining. Business leaders realizing the opportunities that people analytics can provide will be able to make better decisions on shaping their team and their organization. With the use of people analytics, individual team members can constantly improve their skill-sets and provide value for the organization. Highly empowered cross-functional teams will function better and deliver value faster and at the same time will be capable to pinpoint the areas where mid and C level management can support them along the way. Screening candidates through the people analytics framework will become cheaper as the right candidate for the role can be filtered through multiple key indicators.
Would you like to learn more about People Analytics?
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