Why People Analytics Is the Key to a Better Employee Experience: Q&A With Peoplelogic.ai
“People analytics gives organizations the ability to make predictions and proactively look through the windshield, allowing managers to lead using data, augmenting the everyday management of their team.”
People analytics for HR is going through a seismic shift in 2020. According to Deloitte, 71% of companies see people analytics as a high priority in their organizations (31% rate it very important). Matthew Schmidt, CEO, Peoplelogic.ai, a data-driven platform, discusses how HR can improve team performance during a pandemic like COVID-19 using people analytics. He talks about the most common challenges organizations face when it comes to choosing, deploying, or adopting workforce analytics.
In this edition of HR Talk, Matthew shares the secret behind delivering a superior employee experience and strengths-based leadership program. He also puts the spotlight on how people analytics is reshaping employee experience and enabling HR leaders to work cross-functionally.
Key takeaways from our interview on people analytics for better employee experience:
- Top tips for HR managers to improve team performance in 2020
- Best practices for implementing people analytics
- Key trends to follow in people analytics space in 2020 and post pandemic
Here’s the edited transcript from our exclusive interview with Matthew Schmidt:
1. How can people analytics empower managers to improve team performance in 2020?
People analytics gives organizations the ability to make predictions and proactively look through the windshield, allowing managers to lead using data, augmenting the everyday management of their team.
When it comes to empowering managers to improve team performance, people analytics tools surface insights once unavailable. Armed with data and facts, managers can identify the best way to improve the employee experience within their team in an un-biased way, thus driving team performance.
2. What’s the secret sauce to deliver a superior employee experience and strengths-based leadership program?
The key to delivering a superior employee experience and strengths-based leadership is sun setting the archaic, “one size fits all“ management model and making the transformation to using data to truly understand and lead your people: how do they best accomplish work, what are their unique strengths, how do they like to be managed, what are the ways in which they like to feel valued? When you can discern these critical pieces of your individual team members, you can begin to tailor and individualize your management style to find a frequency that resonates for you and them.
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3. Which are the top 3 ways HR can improve team performance even during a pandemic like COVID-19?
Communication and transparency are key now more than ever. As the world navigates the shift to remote work, it’s essential for HR to maintain an open line of communication with employees to understand how they’re doing, articulate what’s going on in the business, and ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Equally important, it’s paramount that HR and managers build and extend empathy. Empathetic workplaces tend to enjoy stronger collaboration and greater morale, and their employees bounce back more quickly from challenging circumstances. Extending empathy in times of crisis builds trust and trust drives loyalty. Both will be critical coming out of the pandemic as organizations seek to refocus and execute on long-term strategic goals and plans. Empathy and communication also pave the way for HR to be successful in the final way they can improve team performance: effective change facilitation.
Effective change facilitation is critical to successfully navigating change, no matter if it’s a pandemic, hyper-growth, or a culture shift you’re moving through. HR must serve as a change agent, helping to articulate the ‘what’ and ‘why’ around specific organizational changes as well as the vision for the outcome. Change is not a moment, but a series of moments, and HR plays a role throughout the journey.
4. Can you tell us what are the 3 most common challenges organizations face when it comes to choosing, deploying, or adopting workforce analytics?
Traditionally, it has been very difficult for organizations, particularly small and medium-sized organizations to truly utilize workforce analytics because of the sometimes-hefty infrastructure that is required to gather the data required. Large enterprises have had a jumpstart in the workforce analytics space because they have had several years collecting and structure the massive amount of data their teams and their people are generating.
And that’s just the first challenge. Once you have good data, you need a data scientist or data analysts, and sometimes even full teams comprised of them to make sense of that data. Historically analysts and data scientist held the keys to unlocking the story within that data, which can again be a hefty cost for smaller organizations. It’s important to put the systems in place that can democratize an organization’s data.
Lastly, companies then need to cultivate a culture of data-driven management, which is easier said than done. It’s a challenge asking people to change the way in which they work, the way in which they manage, and the way in which they lead. It’s important to augment those individualities with data, not to be a hinderance, but to empower each employee to make decisions rooted in fact and truth versus split-second, emotional decisions.
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5. If an HR leader is tasked with deploying people analytics in the existing human capital management systems (HCM), where should they begin? What should be the key elements and milestones in this journey?
It’s critical to start with the “why.” HR leaders shouldn’t just gather data for the sake of gathering data. A critical component of a successful people analytics deployment is gathering data that is useful, but more importantly, the data must be actionable and answer the questions HR leaders seek to answer.
Furthermore, it’s essential to identify and set consistent metrics to report on, that way your week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter, and eventually year over year analyses will be statistically significant. A great way I’ve personally witnessed HR leaders excel with a broader people analytics program is also developing a “data dictionary.” It’s important everyone internally is speaking the same language and understand the true meaning of any data point.
Equally important, the best HR leaders put the processes in place to ensure that the data being collected is consistent, clean, and completely free of biases. At the end of the day, the quality of the data you’re collecting will have a direct impact on the decisions that are made.
As a milestone, it’s important that all users are trained to accurately input information to make it useable. This is a very tough challenge to overcome, and why we focus on aggregating clean data automatically using the platforms most teams use daily. However, if you still rely on that manual input, you’ve got to train your team how to input the data in accordance to your established processes, which should be developed when you set out to answer the initial “why.”
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6. Which are the top three best practices for implementing people analytics, you wish were more widely followed?
A lot of organizations set out on a course to develop a people analytics program without first architecting what goals they want to accomplish, what insights they need to optimize around those goals, and having the systems in place to accurately aggregate, structure, analyze, and act upon that data.
Secondarily, two things are critical: ask the correct questions and ensure access to clean, structured data. Often, companies fall into a trap of planning for today, or even yesterday. You must always keep growth and scale in mind. What data do you need to collect and act on as your organizations continues to grow, as more employees generate data, how do you make it accessible and actionable as the structure of your company continues to evolve?
Lastly, it’s important to ensure that your company, and the culture that you’ve collectively built, support and empower proactive management. With a successful people analytics deployment, the trends within data give leaders a unique opportunity to get ahead of problems and strategically pivot in real time, instead of being forced to react after the fact. It’s critical that managers feel empowered to make the right decision at the right time, but it’s up to people analytics leaders to provide them with the tools they need to lead effectively clean, actionable, and accurate data.
7. Can you explain with an example how people analytics is reshaping employee experience and enabling HR leaders to work cross-functionally?
People analytics has been and continues to reshape the employee experience by leveraging data to paint a holistic picture of how employees and organizations work together towards a better future. By taking the initiative to deploy a people analytics programs, companies have a unique opportunity to really understand what makes a team member passionate, productive, and engaged while having the ability to measure the outcomes that shifts in culture, strategy, and management can have across an organizations.
Furthermore, cross-functional leaders get a new contextual layer using their team’s data to better understand how teams are interacting, both from a personal and professional perspective. Not only can this lead to proactively identifying inefficiencies or bottlenecks but can also give insight into what sort of structure, projects, and goals teams prefer working towards. At the end of the day, a successful people analytics initiative takes a number of items into account to shape strategy you can’t just measure productivity for instance, it’s critical that the data you collect gives comprehensive insight into your workforce, taking into account work/life balance, management style preferences, and even personality. By delivering leadership that is as unique as an organization’s workforce, and being able to act on it, will power the next frontier of high performing companies with passionate and invested teams.
8. Can you give us a sneak-peek into the upcoming projects on people analytics that you are most excited about?
I firmly believe that we are at an inflection point within the people analytics space. Particularly, with what is occurred over the past month or so. It is an evolutionary time of rapid digital transformation, and increased generation of data from tools across entire organizations, that will have vast effects on the overall employee experience. Quite simply, people analytics is augmenting and accelerating the changes we see around the employee experience. Companies are strategically positioned to put systems in place to not only ensure that work is getting done, but to measure how each employee prefers to work and drive continued growth even during challenging times.
People analytics is the avenue to which companies can truly deliver strengths-based leadership, empowering everyone in the organization to continually work at their best. In doing so, they will continue to move along the employee experience maturity curve. We’ll continue to see a lot of companies offering more flexibility, bolstering data-driven management, and building teams of individuals who are more vested in not just their own roles, responsibilities, and opportunity, but in the success of their teams and organizations as a whole, than ever before. The fascinating byproduct of a first-class employee experience is performance, higher productivity, engagement, retention, and at the end of the day, revenue generation.
9. What’s trending in the people analytics space for 2020 and beyond?
One of the greatest trends in the people analytics space is leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to augment people’s skillsets. When people hear about AI, their mind tends to go towards something found in the movies, but in actual practice AI/ML has made incredible strides bolstering people in their roles, augmenting their skillset, and giving them back more time to focus on uniquely human-centric tasks.
Importantly, and along the same vein, the development in technology over the last few years has made data more accessible and now platforms have the capability to not only make that data within reach, but are making it actionable through driving a clear, concise, and easy-to-access analysis and guidance. I think we will continue to see that trend and it’s important. People want to become data-driven; they want to make better decisions; it is up to organizations like ours to make sure we make that dream a reality.
Collectively, now that we all have arrived at this point in time where data is more accessible and there are tools to help make sense of the that data, the next frontier is continuing to automate predictive and prescriptive guidance around that data all in an effort to make it more actionable, no matter your experience, your role, or your background.
Thank you, Matthew, for sharing your thoughts on why HR need to invest in people analytics platforms to deliver a better employee experience. We hope to talk to you again, soon.
About Matthew Schmidt
Matthew Schmidt is the CEO and Founder of Peoplelogic.ai. Matthew is a lifetime entrepreneur and technologist who is passionate about helping businesses scale. Acknowledging the scarcity of talent and the broad trend of businesses transitioning to remote work, Matthew has grown to have a deep passion for the employee experience and maximizing an organization’s people investments.
About PeopleLogic.ai
Peoplelogic.ai, creator of the world’s first AI-augmented employee experience and people analytics tool for managers. The platform provides a beacon that ensures the alignment, development, and performance of teams and the people that make them by automatically surfacing recommendations and insights based on their team’s activities, behaviors, and personalities. Whether a team is in the office, distributed, or fully remote, Peoplelogic encourages real-time, strengths-based leadership to make growth scalable.
About HR Talk
HR Talk is an interview series that features top people and talent leaders from HR tech and Fortune 500 companies who are redefining the future of work. Join us as we talk to these HR tech and people analytics experts to get in-depth insights, and some pro-tips on how HR tech can best work for you and your people.
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