According to RedThread Research’s 2020 study on the People Analytics Technology market, there are over 120 vendors with a combined value in excess of $2 billion. Our own research at Insight222 found that more than 80% of companies are using (37%) or planning to use (44%) advanced people analytics technology to conduct projects, in what we call a ‘Third Wave’ of more specialised analytics technology adoption.

While some existing and emerging people analytics technologies cater to companies of all sizes, I often hear from practitioners in small and medium enterprises that these technologies are simply too cost prohibitive for their meagre budgets.

As such, I was excited to learn from Craig Starbuck, Vice President of People Analytics at Mastercard, and some other intrepid people analytics practitioners that OrgAcuity has been created with the aim of making people analytics available (and affordable) to all.

I jumped on a Zoom call recently with Craig in order to learn more.

1. Craig, can you please provide an overview of your background in people analytics and your current role at Mastercard? 

I spent the first decade of my career in data and analytics roles in health care and banking. In short, I lacked a sense of purpose and meaning in what I was doing. After a period of introspection and careful planning, I returned to graduate school with the intention of breaking into the nascent yet burgeoning field that is people analytics. This strategy proved successful, and I have had the privilege of leading people analytics teams for the past six years – the last two at Mastercard.

2. What was the motivation behind building OrgAcuity, and why do you believe that people analytics should be available to all?

Companies without a people analytics capability are at a competitive disadvantage. All organisations need data and insights to identify drivers of key outcomes like engagement, productivity, and retention of top talent, as these are often contrary to the untested assumptions and theories that all too often guide critical talent decisions in HR. The unfortunate reality is that advanced people analytics tech is currently price prohibitive for most companies – especially smaller organisations. As I have watched the acceleration of open-source software and once prominent analytics vendors fall from fame over the past several years, I began wondering if people analytics could be democratised in an effort to influence positive change on a greater scale.

We spend more waking hours at work than with our families, and it is really important that this substantial piece of our lives is positive and meaningful. Our experiences at work impact other dimensions of our lives in material ways – our relationships with family, friends, and overall wellbeing. There are subtle cries for help in data and providing organisations a clear view into these insidious barriers to success can be transformative for people both individually and collectively. This is the impetus behind OrgAcuity’s formation: to help every organisation gain access to advanced people analytics technology in order to promote healthier, happier, and more productive workplaces.

3. Who else has been involved in getting OrgAcuity off the ground?

 OrgAcuity has been a labour of love and driven by an altruistic desire to help people thrive in work and life. Everyone who has contributed to this platform has full-time roles and has donated their time and talent to make the vision of ‘People Analytics for All’ a reality. OrgAcuity has been bootstrapped in the full sense of the term – no investors, no debt, and no compensation. Contributions have varied widely, and all have collectively resulted in a comprehensive and highly differentiated platform. While 2020 was an incredibly difficult year on multiple fronts, the additional time quarantined indoors was channelled into something truly remarkable, and organisations around the world will be the beneficiaries.

Matt Milunski, who is a data engineering consultant by day and OrgAcuity’s engineer by night, was the instrumental player in building OrgAcuity’s infrastructure in Google Cloud. Conversations about this platform began with data privacy and information security principles and best practices, and these have been central to every design decision thanks to Matt’s leadership. As Matt rightly notes, “If the data organisations entrust us with are not securely transferred, protected, and governed with industry-leading access controls and safeguards, nothing else matters.”

Constructive feedback on the product has been provided by more people than I can name here. Simplicity was established as a key objective from the start to ensure organisations will not need expensive professional services firms to implement the platform or to interpret and action on results. Feedback collected through usability studies has been crucial to developing a set of dashboards that are intuitive and simple to navigate. “The ability to enter questions directly into the tool and immediately get answers is one of the many features that helps make this easy for anyone to use” (Rosey Rhyne, Senior Research Manager at DDI).

Interested in learning more about People Analytics? Take a look at our online People Analytics certifications on myHRfuture

4. How do you see the People analytics HR tech landscape evolving and how do you believe this will impact or shape an organisation’s approach to HR tech investment?

First, employee feedback given to HR is likely to be influenced by some measure of social desirability bias. For this reason, I think there will always be a place for third parties to capture honest signals in the data and better anticipate future behaviour and events. The rapidly evolving future of work and increased focus on employee wellbeing has only amplified the importance of capturing the voice of employees and gaining a clear understanding of where to focus to meaningfully influence opportunity areas.

In our always-on society, there are continuous and seemingly relentless forces competing for our attention. I believe the key to realising the full value of technology and facilitating sustained adoption is simplifying the user experience and minimising cognitive load requirements. Unified, all-in-one platforms have gained considerable traction largely for this reason; people prefer to avoid the friction in traversing multiple systems to accomplish tasks.

The same is true for people analytics tech. Integrating data and insights across often-disparate dimensions of the employee experience is key for a comprehensive understanding of complex and nuanced dynamics influencing success. For example, by bringing together Organisation Network Analysis (ONA), EX surveys, and business outcomes, organisations can answer more consequential questions such as, “What is driving voluntary churn among our most highly connected people, and what is the projected business impact of these key departures?” It is currently very challenging to answer these questions with any one vendor; therefore, organisations often must stand up costly data warehouses to integrate data from the various source systems in which data are collected and stored.

OrgAcuity’s platform is a curation of the best of employee listening and people analytics within a unified and highly intuitive platform: EX surveys, ONA, text analytics, predictive attrition, DEIB insights, leader and culture assessments, business impact analysis, and much more. While each component has value in its own right, the unique integration of these domains, bundled with an intelligent alert system and a powerful search engine for fast and easy answers, sets this platform apart.

Another unique feature of OrgAcuity’s platform is that insights are organised as a set of narratives users can write, rather than the traditional approach in which questions and insights are often unclear or lost in a sea of data visualisations.

In addition, we have discovered that some vendors working to become the vanguard of innovation in people analytics tech often face resistance from companies due to employee privacy concerns. For this reason, our product strategy has been to build an innovative, comprehensive, and actionable feature set whilst removing the intrusive, contentious, and difficult-to-implement features that are likely to impede adoption across a broad cross section of industries.

5. What advice would you offer small companies that are trying to get started in / build their analytics capability?

My advice for small companies building out a people analytics capability for the first time is the same I would provide a large company: don’t pay the exorbitant premium for vendor solutions branded as ‘AI’. Even in the few cases where AI is part of the technology, it won’t be the great miracle elixir it is often promised to be. The reality is that in a people analytics context, the ‘AI’ is unlikely to perform even marginally better than the tools social scientists have used for decades.

AI tends to be used as a ‘catch all’ category for everything today, including rudimentary techniques such as descriptive statistics, conditional logic, and linear regression (which has been around for more than 100 years). Vendors tend to exploit the confusion this has introduced by adding an ‘AI’ label to whatever is being sold in an attempt to charge a premium and excite buyers – especially HR buyers – who they perceive may not know the difference.

If you review scholarly journals in the social sciences, it won’t take long to arrive at the conclusion that explaining variance in human behaviour – especially in organisational contexts – is a messy and complicated endeavour. This is because as much as we try to categorise people into groups that think and behave in similar ways, individual differences are a reality generating considerable variability within groups and creating significant challenges in separating signal from noise in the data. Even the most well-designed and rigorous organisational studies are capable of explaining maybe one-quarter of an outcome’s variance.

Modelling human behaviour is highly nuanced, contextual, and hard. In many cases, such endeavours prove to be exercises in futility, as there is simply no significant information in the data to explain or predict the outcome of interest. I would caution buyers to view as suspect grandiose claims that a vendor has built ‘AI’ that solves for this.

Descriptive statistics != AI. Buyer beware.

6. OrgAcuity focuses on not only providing insights about an organisation but really combining people analytics and employee experience – why is it so important that PA and EX come together?

 I think it is important for PA and EX to be integrated. The attitudinal and perceptive signals we can pick up from EX surveys, for example, provide powerful leading indicators of future events such as voluntary attrition.  

While core HCM data are sufficient for many basic HR KPIs, in my experience there generally isn’t enough signal in these data to perform meaningful analyses in support of more complex questions and hypotheses. The utility of deeply understanding dimensions of the employee experience cannot be overstated, and I believe it to be integral to an effective people analytics strategy.

7. How have companies used the insights that OrgAcuity provides to drive greater business value?

One important aspect of OrgAcuity’s platform is that it helps HR speak in the language of money. In the year 2021, organisations should be able to quantify the financial return on their human capital investments. For example, “For every $1 investment in employee wellbeing, we receive back $2.50 through increased productivity and retention of key talent.” OrgAcuity’s platform helps HR quantify how each one-unit improvement in employee outcomes like engagement or retention influences business outcomes like customer satisfaction, sales quotas attained, tickets resolved, and revenue.

In the short time since OrgAcuity’s MVP was released, it has already gained significant traction and organisations are quickly connecting with the unique features of this platform. “OrgAcuity’s simplicity and depth combination is unmatched, and I am beyond excited to see this analytics platform bring to light our real challenges so we can map out a precise solution” (Brian Williamson, Chief Leadership & Development Officer at Quility).

8. What are your plans for OrgAcuity moving forward, and how can people find out more?

This is only the beginning. OrgAcuity is more than a people analytics platform; it is a movement that I believe will accelerate the impact of people analytics globally and fundamentally transform the vendor landscape. I think there is a high likelihood that this movement may do to the people analytics tech landscape what open source did to the large legacy software companies that are now all but absent from our lexicons. Rest assured, there are some highly motivated and passionate people working to drive price normalization across the industry and ensure data-driven people decisions are within reach for all organisations.

For more information, you can check out OrgAcuity’s website (www.orgacuity.com). There are people trained to provide demos and support implementations, and this team will continue to grow as demand increases. 

If you are in people analytics and interested in contributing on a part-time basis, you can apply to the evergreen requisitions on the careers page to be connected with opportunities. We need the help of more from our generous people analytics community to achieve the global scale required for realising our vision of ‘People Analytics for All’.

THANK YOU

Thanks to Craig for his time and for sharing the exciting story behind OrgAcuity. If you want to find out more, you can connect with Craig on LinkedIn and visit OrgAcuity’s website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Craig Starbuck is a global people analytics leader with a passion for extracting intelligence from people data to promote healthier, happier, and more productive organisations. Craig spent a decade in data and analytics roles in the healthcare and banking sectors before completing his PhD to facilitate a transition into people analytics. Craig then led people analytics teams at Scottrade and Equifax before joining Mastercard as Vice President of People Analytics where he currently leads a large team providing strategic decision support to business leaders across the globe. Craig’s brainchild, OrgAcuity, was born out of an altruistic desire to help people thrive in work and life by democratising access to advanced people analytics technology.

David Green is an author, speaker and executive consultant on people analytics, data-driven HR and the future of work. As Managing Partner and Executive Director, he has overall responsibility for the delivery of the Insight222 People Analytics Program, which supports the advancement of people analytics in over 70 global organisations. Prior to co-founding Insight222 and taking up a board advisor role at TrustSphere, David accumulated over 20 years experience in the human resources and people analytics fields, including as Global Director of People Analytics Solutions at IBM. David also hosts the Digital HR Leaders Podcast and is an instructor for Insight222's myHRfuture Academy. His book, co-authored with Jonathan Ferrar, Excellence in People Analytics: How to use Workforce Data to Create Business Value will be published in the summer of 2021.

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