Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics
Impact, Value, Focus
We are fortunate to have seen people analytics in practice in every major country and industry, globally. In almost every one of these organisations, we have come across three themes repeatedly: Impact, value and focus.
How can I improve my impact? Organisations that build solid, business-oriented foundations - and don’t just dive into solving technology and data issues - create more impact on a long-term basis.
How can I create more value? Leaders and practitioners regularly focus on the activity of analytics and forget that the end goal is to create value both for businesses and employees.
What should I focus on? Practitioners who focus on business challenges linked to the people strategy of the company are more successful in their endeavours.
The answers to these three questions vary depending upon the situation, level of experience of the person, business challenges and industry. Having said that, the answers can be found within nine dimensions, grouped into three categories: building foundations, managing resources and delivering value. We call it the Insight222 Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics® model.
The most successful organisations seek excellence in all nine dimensions and address them in a way that is suitable (and in whatever order is suitable) for their company. We find that organisations that have the most impact focus on all three categories simultaneously. This is not a sequential model. It does not require you to do things in a particular order. And, it does not imply that you cannot move from one thing to the next without achieving a certain level of ‘maturity’.
“This is the best framework for People Analytics I’ve ever seen”
Oliver Kasper
Director HR Analytics, Processes & Systems, Swarovski
The Insight222 Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics® model
Foundation
The foundational aspects of people management revolve around having the right elements in place up front to enable success in the future, before the work becomes too complex.
Dimension One: Governance
This dimension is about the mechanisms, processes and procedures by which a company operates and manages risk.
The two primary focuses here are:
Having the right structures in place to help with data standards, ethics and privacy
Having the right structures in place to manage the selection of projects and analytics work.
Without proper governance, analytics work loses focus, value and impact and the risk of doing unnecessary work is heightened
Dimension Two: Methodologies
This dimension covers the steps that exist to ensure that People Analytics follows a clear yet agile path so that the work is meaningful, has purpose, generates impact and improves individual and organisational performance.
Successful people analytics always starts with understanding the business challenges that are most important. Once you understand the ‘why,’ you will get more from analytics. You will also be able to effectively prioritise projects in order to deliver the most value for the business.
We are often asked “What one thing would you recommend an HR leader pursuing analytics to do?” … Our answer is always, “Focus on your business challenges first!”
Dimension Three: Stakeholders
People analytics is most successful when it is fully embedded in the operations of a company. This requires the successful engagement of stakeholders.
It is vital to:
Understand the people, functions and groups that are most important
Communicate regularly, appropriately and with clarity
In our model, we think about seven types of stakeholders: Business executives, HR leaders, managers, employees and workers, functional stakeholders, technology and data owners and unions, and finally, works councils and employee groups.
Resources
The resources that are needed to develop solutions and deliver impact from people analytics are people (or skills), technology and data.
Dimension Four: Skills
We identify Six Skills for Success* in people analytics: Business Acumen, Consulting, Human Resources, Work Psychology, Data Science and Communications. (Note, these are different to the skills we have identified for the future of HR.) These may be built in your team, sourced from elsewhere in the business or hired on an ‘as needed’ basis from outside your company.
Dimension Five: Technology
Sourcing, deploying and using technology for analytics is made complicated by the fact there are literally thousands of vendors.
Your technology needs will be across visualisation, business intelligence, statistics, machine learning and AI, amongst others.
They will include both hardware, software and be delivered on premises, ‘as a service’ or as a hybrid.
The approach we recommend is to focus on understanding what your needs are in relation to the business problem you are trying to solve, rather than focusing on 'the next shiny thing’
Dimension Six: Data
Knowing, using, integrating, managing and securing people and business data is essential if anything else is going to be done at all.
This dimension is important to understand standards, security, data options and what you need to answer your most pressing challenges.
It also covers the need to focus on internal and external data sources and how to analyse your situation and decide what additional data to gather to improve your analysis.
Value
The value you derive from your people analytics activities will be determined by those with whom you interact and impact.
Dimension Seven: Workforce Experiences
This dimension of the model focuses on understanding your appetite and ability to focus analytics on the employees/workers and managers themselves, through personalisation, recommendation algorithms, the consumerisation of HR and democratisation of data to managers.
As an example, Nielsen offered analytical value not just in financial terms, but by highlighting the benefits of career change to employees and sharing a video about what, how and why attrition analytics matters.
Dimension Eight: Business Outcomes
Delivering insights through effective people analytics will ensure your executives and leaders are informed with insights to make decisions.
These insights can be about productivity, cost optimisation or revenue enhancement.
This dimension ensures that the business will gain organisational benefit from people analytics in the future.
Dimension Nine: Culture
Deploying analytics is easier and more impactful when the culture of HR and the organisation overall is receptive to analytical insights. Striving for a strong analytics culture is crucial.“How can my team be more quantitative?” and “How can I train my HR business partners?” are two of the most frequent questions we hear.
Where to go from here
At Insight222 we help clients diagnose their own functional excellence in people analytics — using the Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics model.
By undertaking a thorough survey, we diagnose your level of sophistication against each of the nine dimensions. We then help you and your HR leadership team create a roadmap for success by defining the next steps to focus on.
If you wish to learn more about the Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics model and how to diagnose your own function’s excellence then please contact me at jonathan.ferrar@insight222.com. The model is provided as part of Insight222’s The People Analytics Program.
“I’m a member of Insight222 because I would rather learn how my peers innovated to build something than spend three years trying to build it ourselves!”
Steffen Riesenbeck
People Analytics Project Lead, Bosch
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Notes:
The dimensions, elements and survey of the Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics model were developed by Jonathan Ferrar, Co-founder & CEO and David Green, Non-Executive Director and Board Advisor of Insight222 Limited. Their qualitative research in People Analytics covers over sixty organisations in all major regions around the world and was undertaken over a period of five years.
The Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics is the copyright of and proprietary to Insight222 Limited.
The Six Skills for Success is a model from The Power of People: Learn How Successful Organisations Use Workforce Analytics to Improve Business Performance and the copyright of its authors Nigel Guenole, Jonathan Ferrar and Sheri Feinzig.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Ferrar is the CEO and co-founder of Insight222. He is a globally respected speaker, author and business adviser in HR strategy, workforce analytics, and the future of work. Jonathan has worked in corporate business for 25+ years for companies like Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Lloyds Bank, and IBM where he served as executive manager for 10+ years. He is a keynote speaker, co-author of The Power of People, and Board Member of the CIPD.