The Role of People Analytics in the Future of Work
Or, takeaways from the PAFOW conference… for dummies
This last week I attended the People Analytics and Future of Work (#PAFOW) conference in San Francisco. It was well organized and I loved it, despite hating to attend conferences alone. Anybody in the space should go straight to www.pafow.com and find out how they can get involved.
Beforehand, however, I was questioning whether I am ‘in the space’. Yes, I am all-in on the ‘Future of Work’ (FOW) space. But I have very little to do with ‘People Analytics’ (PA), and I knew this conference would be very PA-centric. I heard that the London conference has more focus on the FOW part of the title, but I questioned the value I would get from the San Francisco edition.
That question was completely unfounded. This post is aimed at all FOW thinkers. You need to know the value of People Analytics.
Before last week I knew of people analytics. I subscribe to Al Adamsen’s PAFOW podcast, and the term comes up in most ‘employee experience’ research that I read. But I didn’t understand the field. Dawn Klinghoffer from Microsoft gave an inspiring talk in the morning on Building Employee Trust through people analytics. It was fascinating but I was left bewildered more than once. Safe to say I was in the bottom decile of PA knowledge in the room. I was there to see if any of the content was relevant to my FOW thinking.
I learned that it is extremely relevant. People analytics is a key enabler of the Future of Work. It provides vital evidence to HR leaders that aren’t as forward-thinking as we may expect. They need more than glossy reports to persuade them to try new ways of working. PA enables the function to experiment and learn in a scientific way that increases the speed at which HR functions innovate. The faster they innovate, the faster we achieve the Future of Work.
But that’s a lot. Let’s break it apart.
HR functions generally are more old fashioned than we think. For those of us that spend a lot of time writing, reading and thinking about the Future of Work, the case for change is strong. We assume top CHROs are also in this world…but very few are. For the majority, the case isn’t yet strong, and so the change is not inevitable.
I have interviewed over 25 HR executives for a research report I am writing. Most CHROs are executives with 20+ years of experience in HR. Put simply, they have found success through tried and tested methods. They feel that they are innovating within their function, but to the outside observer this innovation feels marginal. Some ‘innovative’ practices described to me had been implemented 20 years prior in other organizations. But they are successful and so CHROs don’t feel the need to push the innovation further.
These less innovative HR functions often suffer from a lack of evidence. It’s no surprise that these are often large, entrenched organizations. They only have macro-level metrics to measure the success of an HR ‘innovation’. New ‘flexi-time’ policies only survive if they are extraordinarily popular — because the data the leadership team has access to isn’t fine enough to see the huge impact the policy has on key individuals.
Almost unanimously in my research was the fact that new innovations begin as pilots, trials or experiments. As they should. An organization’s people are far too precious to force untested policies upon. But even CHROs that have the highest willingness to ‘test and learn’ won’t innovate if they are hampered in their learning. There is no use experimenting if there is no way of knowing the business impact of the change with any confidence. To make the Future of Work a reality, these HR leaders need the ability to test and learn as quickly as possible. This is why people analytics is vital.
One definition of people analytics is the use of data to enable critical decisions to be made about the workforce. It enables that decision making by enabling an exec to say ‘this pilot was successful because this metric increased 10x. We should roll it out across the organization’. The greater the people analytics capability of an organization, the faster these insights can be reached, the finer the HR policy instrument can become (because finer outcomes can be detected, and ultimately, the faster organizations can innovate.
To any people analytics professionals reading - I’m sorry for stating the obvious. But this isn’t obvious to the rest of us. I am scraping the surface of what people analytics can do for an organization — honestly some the of insights presented were mind-blowing. But I feel this is the key point that will spur change.
If your organization doesn’t have a people analytics function yet then do your best to make one happen. Then — and only then — we can start talking about the Future of Work.
Thanks for reading! Please share this with your PA/FOW/HR networks and anybody that might be interested. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, and please let me know if you’d like to be involved in my research at all.
