Episode 22: The Evolution of People Analytics at Microsoft (Interview with Dawn Klinghoffer, Head of People Analytics)
I'm often asked to provide examples of global organisations that lead the way when it comes to people analytics, whether that's based on business outcomes, benefit to the workforce or sophistication of the work.
Microsoft is always one of the first companies that I mention. The leader of Microsoft's People Analytics team is Dawn Klinghoffer and she is my guest on this week’s episode of the podcast, Dawn has led the People Analytics function at Microsoft for over 15 years, and we caught up recently at the global executive retreat that Insight222 and TI People hosted on the topics of Next Gen HR, people analytics and digital HR.
I've known Dawn for a few years and never fail to be impressed with the pioneering work she and her team are doing at Microsoft. In our conversation, Dawn and I discuss the evolution of people analytics at Microsoft and the recent change she has made in how the team is organised.
You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation, Dawn and I discuss:
Her vision for people analytics at Microsoft
How she organises her people analytics function at Microsoft
The importance of employee trust in creating and sustaining an advanced people analytics function
Examples of people analytics projects being delivered at Microsoft
Ways to create a data driven culture
We look into the crystal ball and ponder what the role of HR will be in 2025
This episode is a must listen for anyone in a workforce or people analytics role, HR and business professionals interested in how people data can drive business outcomes and CHROs looking to build or scale their people analytics capabilities.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by OrgVue to learn more, visit orgvue.com.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today I'm delighted to welcome Dawn Klinghoffer, Global Head of People Analytics at Microsoft to the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Thank you. Thank you for having me on the show.
David Green: And it's a special one because we're at the Insight222 Global Executive Retreat as well. So we're in a different location to our usual studio.
Welcome to the show Dawn, please can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to yourself, your background and your vision when it comes to people analytics.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, so I have been at Microsoft for over 20 years, which is, it seems like probably an eternity to most people, but every day I'm still excited to wake up and go to work, so that tells me that I'm still at the right place.
I've actually had multiple careers, within Microsoft. So I started in finance. I worked in finance for five years. I had multiple roles even in those five years. And then I was lured to HR, not that being in HR was ever part of my career plan, this is one of the reasons why I tell people, never really have a career plan, because you never know what's gonna come your way.
But I got lured to HR, we had a data warehouse at that time. This was over 15 years ago, but no one knew what to do with the data. And, so I was kind of tasked to figure out what kind of, what kind of gold were in the hills, if you would. And once I realised that really there was a ton of gold, 15 years later, I'm still doing that work.
David Green: Well, you've been, as you said, running or building that team for quite a long time, and, it's rightly respected I think as one of the leading people analytics functions on the planet. You kindly share a lot of the work that you do in the Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn and everything else, which I think is great for the community.
It's much appreciated by the community, so thank you for that. When we were speaking last week, you said that you'd just announced a new, big change into how your team's organised. and I know our listeners love to hear how people analytics team is organised.
So it would be great to hear your thinking behind that change and what you're looking to accomplish as well.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, so you asked me what my vision is for people analytics and obviously, so our vision is really simple. It's Data Driven HR. Okay. So we are trying to change the way HR works. That's what I like to say, and we're trying to change them to be more data-driven. And so I'll start with how my team was organised, because then it will help to make more sense about how I'm changing things. So my organisation had four teams. Two teams were really organised around capability and two teams by audience.
So the two teams by capability, we have an advanced analytics and research team, they have our data scientists and our IO psychologists. And, the folks that are really doing the advanced research and analytics. Building statistical models. And then I have a reporting solutions team and that reporting solutions team, they work on all of our technology that we roll out to HR.
Now they partner very heavily with our IT team. So this isn't a team of IT professionals. These are a team of professionals that understand technology, but also understand what our customers need. Then the two teams that I had that were built around capability, or by audience, one was focused on our centres of excellence. So we have diversity and inclusion. We have our recruiting function, talent management, learning and development. our operations team, we support all of those teams, and we have analysts that support them and all of their program needs. And so, while we don't really necessarily dedicate an analyst to different programs. In essence, we kind of do, we just don't like to tell our customers sometimes that, oh, you have this, two analysts that you can do whatever you want with. We always like to prioritise the work.
And then another team that was focused on the HR line audience. Now the problem is that over time, as we've grown those line and COE teams were not clean. Okay. So the COE team also had our team of program managers and project managers that deal with our very large rhythm of the business events. They program manage our listening systems, which, we have such a robust listening system. It takes humans to operationalise that.
And then our line teams also had our reporting team, which is our tier one support. And it also had our cross-business team. So our company-wide analytics team, and that crosses both the line and the COEs. Now, one of the things that I say is that in order for my team to be successful, we need to work across the organisation, we have to work horizontally. You can't work in your silos. But we were still struggling to work together. And so, my leadership team and I have been talking about making a change for a little while but trying to figure out if we're going to make a change, we really need to make a change that's going to last for a while.
Okay. And so, one of the things that our HR organisation has really been pivoting on is solutions at scale. Our company is also thinking that way, solutions at scale. And so I thought to myself, what can we do in the people analytics function to also focus on solutions at scale? And that's when it hit me that we needed an analytics at scale team.
Okay. So now I will have a very clean COE analytics team, a very clean line analytics team. And then I will have an analytics at scale team and that analytics at scale team will have our program and project managers it will have our tier one support and it'll also have our cross-company analytics.
So that team is going to be responsible for intake. So that we can prioritise across, It will also be responsible for basically creating a repository for my team. A library if you would of all the analytics that we do, because what was happening is there was a lot of duplication of effort because not everyone was talking to one another.
It's hard to work as one, but it's one of our cultural attributes and we try really, really, really hard to get there. So we're really, you know, I'm investing in this change because I really feel like this will enable us to work more as one.
David Green: And I think from speaking to you previously, increasingly people analytics is going towards a bit of more of a product focus as well.
So as you said you're creating those products at scale, which potentially anyone in Microsoft could use once they're rolled out.
Dawn Klinghoffer: So yeah, it's amazing to see within the last five years the number of products that we have that are focused on people analytics. I mean, I love it because my team gets to operate as customer zero.
We get to have access to these products before they hit the marketplace. We get to test them, we get to provide feedback directly with the engineering teams and then we also get to talk to customers about what we're doing. And customers they want to talk to practitioners, they want to see... Oh yeah that I have the same challenge as you. How are you solving that challenge and how are you using technology for that?
David Green: And I know Kathleen Hogan is a Chief People Officer who is passionate, supportive, and conversant about people analytics, which is great because it's a good example for lots of others.
How does this help your work and, and do you work together with Kathleen and how do you work together with Kathleen and the rest of the HR leadership team?
Dawn Klinghoffer: So it absolutely helps my work that she is so passionate about people analytics. She's passionate about insights. So we were talking about the name of my function, HR Business Insights.
She loves that we have insights in our name because she, it's like a kid in a candy store. She loves new insights. And I just shared with her some new insights that we got the other week and what she's focused on is what she does with the insights. And that is the best part. So she doesn't just want an insight because it's interesting. She wants to figure out what do I do with that information? She is the one that enabled me to go to our senior leadership team, Satya, and his direct reports to even talk about our people analytics strategy and how the products that we have at Microsoft could come together, in this amazing way.
So they have this thing called the researcher of the amazing at the senior leadership team meeting every single Friday. So they bring someone in. Each of the senior leadership team members gets to bring someone in as the researcher of the amazing, and she chose me to come in one day.
And that was really fun, but that shows her passion for this type of work. She also is a math person herself. She was a math major at Harvard. So she just, she understands the value of making data based decisions and she holds her leaders accountable for doing that.
David Green: And I think what's great, as you said, it's not just the insight, it's what can I do with it. And then how does that translate to outcomes for work and also for the business as well so that's great. Topics I know we're both passionate about because we collaborated on an article on it earlier this year, and I know it's something that Kathleen's written about as well.
How important is employee trust to creating and sustaining an advanced people analytics capability?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, I think it's critical actually and we have three components of that that we really think about at Microsoft. One is transparency, the second is value. And the third is purpose.
Transparency is, is challenging yet necessary. Employees need to know what you're doing with their information and you know, it's not always possible to share with them everything that's going on, but certainly when you're trying something new and you're doing something that you think could be a little bit risky and that if employees found out about it, maybe they think it would be a little creepy.
Well, that should tell you right there that you need to communicate with employees what you're doing and you know what I have often told people it's super easy to do creepy things. It's really hard to be creative enough. To figure out how to do things so that it's not creepy.
And that's definitely something that I push myself and I push the rest of the team to think about.
Value, there should be a joint value in the work that we do, not just for employees, but also for the company. And being able to go back to employees and show them that value.
They don't necessarily have to know that we exist. And exactly what we've done. But if they see the results and they see the outcomes and how that impacts them, then they can know that, okay I feel like my data is in good hands. And then purpose. You should always set off on these projects or analytics, whatever you're doing with an intended purpose, what's the outcome? What business problem are you trying to solve? If you don't have that, how are you going to measure whether or not you're successful? And so otherwise it's just like you're just searching for something.
And as an employee myself, I want to know that people have an intended purpose for what they're doing, particularly with my data.
David Green: Well also from a planning perspective, from your team. You want to make sure that whoever is sponsoring that particular project that you're gonna actually...
Dawn Klinghoffer: Oh yes. Well you've kind of got to do that, if you wanted to talk about how I do prioritise, that is how I prioritise. So when people come to our team and say, hey, we need your help, we need you to do this project. One of the first things we ask, because.... and let me back up a little bit.
When I first started out in this org, we were kind of making things up ourselves to do. And we would go shop it around to the different, organisations saying, hey, we could do this for you. And we think this is the value we create and the business outcome. There's some point that happens in a people analytics maturity model where you no longer are shopping around, you are being bombarded. And that is the position that we've been in for the last few years. And while I do carve out part of my team to think about things that people aren't coming and asking them about. Primarily we are inundated with stuff that people want. And one of the ways that we prioritize that work is we say, are you ready to take action? Depending on the results, are you ready to take action? And if they say no, we're just in the beginning stages of thinking about it, we say, why don't you think about it some more? And when you're ready to take action, come back. And if they say yes, then it goes up to the top of the priority list.
David Green: So Dawn I'm going to come back a little bit to the employee trust discussion because earlier this year at the PAFOW conference, you presented at in San Francisco, you talked about this concept of data minimisation and I think it'd be really good to share that cause that's not something I hear from a lot of practitioners.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. That's something that's super important for us. In fact, so important that it was in the required training that we have for employee data privacy and confidentiality.
So we have a required training every single year for HR employees to take, data minimisation is exactly what we try to teach people in terms of, only pull the data that you know that you're going to need for the analysis. You can always add later, but there needs to be a business reason whenever you're adding data elements to the analysis.
I think that most people just want everything and the kitchen sink from the beginning because they're worried that if they don't pull in everything, they're going to miss something. And again, all the work that I try to get my team to do is hypothesis driven. And so if you are, if you were being really true to a hypothesis driven analytics methodology, then what you're doing is you should know what data elements that you should pull in.
And you should be able to use that kind of principle of data minimisation. It has saved us many times where we kind of get into an area that could be considered, from our legal friends, a little bit risky. And by using data minimisation, we're able to bring them in at the right time and have the conversation with them before we've brought in everything.
David Green: And last thing on the privacy thing and then employee trust just because it's suddenly just spun into my head. You actually have a privacy expert in the people analytics team.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. So, I have one privacy manager on the team that's dedicated to us. She works on behalf of our team in terms of data privacy, but she also is the person that works across the company for anyone that needs or wants access to employee data for anything that they're doing.
So obviously a lot of our engineering teams are building products that require employee data. She does privacy reviews with those teams. She ensures that all of these teams are using our employee data. With all the principles that we have in place, there is a bigger privacy team that sits in our operations team. They are primarily for the HR function. Okay. So, so the privacy person on my team is more for the company in terms of employee data.
David Green: Yeah, it makes sense. And I know it's something that other practitioners are like maybe we should do that.
So examples. Everyone loves to hear about examples of people analytics projects, and I thought what would be really good is if you could share a couple that have specifically delivered value to employees as well.
I know they probably delivered value to the business as well, but the employee element I think could be a good conversation that leads on nicely from the employee trust.
Dawn Klinghoffer: I think I'm gonna switch it up a little and I'm going to talk about two recent analyses that we're not there yet in terms of the business value, but I think they have a lot of promise, and that's why I want to talk about them.
David Green: We like new stuff.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. Just because I feel like I'm just always saying the same thing. So, you know, and these both will deliver a lot of value to the employee. And that's why I specifically want to talk about them. So one of the things that we have been focused on is reorgs. We do a lot of reorgs at Microsoft and we wanted to understand what the impact of reorgs are for employees.
We've heard anecdotal feedback that there is quite a lot of impact to employees. We wanted to kind of put some data to it. So when we first started unpacking the reorg question, it is quite complex. And really what we got to was that, it's the manager change that has quite the impact.
And so if you separate manager changes from voluntary manager changes to involuntary manager changes. Voluntary manager changes, or when an employee changes, you know, a position. Then you have involuntary manager changes, which are mostly due to reorgs or due to managers taking new jobs.
So employees really have no say in whether or not they have a new manager. And what we see is with those involuntary manager changes. There is a correlation to attrition. Okay. Particularly when you have reorgs, the employees that are closer to the manager changes have more of an impact.
It has more of an impact on them. And so you can kind of see that play out in the data. And so, with this result, we were able to go back to the HR leadership team and share with them the impact that managers change, that involuntary manager change, it has on the employees and how we can help them in the future when they're about to do a reorg. If they can come to us, we can model it out together. We can give them information that we'll tag when there are going to be involuntary manager changes. And then how far away these employees are from the manager changes and how many manager changes they may have already had during the year so that you can have a little bit of an intervention if you need to, to ensure that those employees understand.
The one aspect that, that we also saw with the reorg analysis was that, reorgs really give senior leaders an opportunity to reset the strategy for the organisation. And so while in the beginning, the sentiment might decrease. In terms of understanding the strategy, it gives the leader a lot of good impetus to set that strategy more clearly. And that's when we usually see the sentiment rebound.
On a kind of very different topic, but also very much related to helping, and giving value to employees, is around employee voice. So we are very focused on inclusion at Microsoft. We also want employees to feel like they have a voice.
Okay. That they are able to share their concerns when they have concerns, that there are channels for them to do so, and, so one of the things that we've been doing is working with this professor out of the University of Texas, McCombs School of Business. His name is Ethan Burris, and he specialises in employee voice.
And so we've been working with him for a little while now. And, we've been able to take some of the outcomes of asking about voice in our surveys, and matching them up with the workplace analytics, email and calendar metadata. And, organisational networks is something that's very hot right now.
People are really just starting to understand the value of networks. And, what we could see, when we brought this data together was that, managers and employees that have more insular networks. So have more in business networks. Those employees feel empowered to talk and speak up about their work but not necessarily as much about broader cultural, strategic, issues that are going on. It's those managers that have broader networks across the organisation, their employees feel more empowered and have more of a voice to speak up about these kinds of cultural and strategic issues.
So it's really... It was a great insight to understand the difference between these more insular networks and these more broad based networks. And, what we want to be able to do is infuse this in some of the technologies. Specifically like My Analytics, which is the personal dashboard to help people grow their networks.
Okay. We want people to have more of a voice and, and what we're seeing is they can have more of a voice on many more diverse topics if they have more broader networks. So how do you enable people to have those types of diverse networks?
David Green: And I think the great thing about the network stuff, and I know we talked about this and other examples where you've used network analysis, and I think where you've done it very well is you've combined it with other stuff like business performance data and engagement data, and in that first example you mentioned around the reorg, it'll be interesting to look at the networks to find how quickly those networks...
Dawn Klinghoffer: I'm going to do that
David Green: I thought you might.
Dawn Klinghoffer: That's definitely on the list...
David Green: To see how long it takes for those networks to form after each reorganisation. Cause there might be some best practice. Cause it's all nudges I guess, to help the person who is instigating the reorg to understand how can they do it. Effectively. So it supports the business, but also employees.
Dawn Klinghoffer: And also it's not just to the employees that are going through the reorgs. So I see it as, and we'll get to this, you know, hopefully but there's a lot of things that we can do to build into technology. I mean, I truly see people analytics as the secret sauce to the digital transformation.
You can digitally transform all you want. But you're not going to reap the benefits that you can get if you're not taking all of that data and analysing it. And then every company's different. Every company has unique strategy and unique culture and, so you need to understand what moves the dial for your company, and then build them into ways that can seamlessly nudge employees and managers, leaders, to think differently when they're about to do something.
David Green: Two really great examples, Dawn, and just for listeners, we will share links to some of the other articles Dawn has published over the last couple of years with further examples of the work that she's done in people analytics at Microsoft. So what's next? What's the plans for the next 12 to 18 months?
What are some of the things that you're looking at moving forward?
Dawn Klinghoffer: So what I'm most excited about is some technology that we are launching internally, which is called... We're calling it manager hub. So it's technically a manager dashboard. So it's a one stop shop for managers to get information and so I'm partnering with other folks, across Microsoft for this. So this isn't just a one HR initiative. We're also working with folks outside of HR. And we're thinking of this as an insights generation platform. Okay? So when you go as a manager, it's not just going to tell you the actions you need to take. It's going to tell you why you need to take those actions. So we are building learning into it. We're building kind of the basics, like expense management and all sorts compliance things. But then we're building, you know, are you having one on ones with your employees and are you having connects with them, which is part of our performance and development construct. Are you giving people perspectives? So that is the way we give people feedback across the company. We give them perspectives. And, so you'll have a notification there that shows when you have outstanding perspectives or if you met with someone recently and met with them a lot, and you haven't shared any perspectives on them. Okay. So kind of prompting you. These are all future different scenarios that we're thinking about. So we're going to be integrating with workplace analytics or my analytics, to that personal dashboard aspect to give you different nudges.
And, it's a great cross effort that we're doing. And, when I go out and I talk to different people analytics leaders, and ask them if they have something like this, no one has said they do.
David Green: No. People have told me they want something like that.
Dawn Klinghoffer: So we're doing this internally, who knows? You know, maybe we will turn it into something that we can plug into a product later on, but for now, we're gonna test it out internally and see how our managers, kind of adopt this. And then we'll continue. We have a list of insights to put in this. So it's like the people analytics function is just generating these insights and we get insights from other places around the company as well. So we're really looking forward to that. We're in pilot launch right now, and we're moving towards a global launch, sometime this year.
So we're really, actually at sometime in the next fiscal year. So, we're really excited about that.
David Green: If you're a manager and you've got this nudge, effectively saying, if you do this, this is why you should do it. And this is what the outcome would be.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yes. So training, we're so excited to be able to say, Hey, you're a new manager. Did you know that if you take this manager's essential class, your workplace health index may go up by 10% because that's what we normally see. That's the... When we did the analysis, we saw that compared to folks that did not take that manager's essentials class, that was the difference. And we can't promise you that that's going to happen. You could be a horrible manager and still take the class and it doesn't help you. But, we want to try to give you those insights, where we can.
David Green: It's like the onboarding work that you did. You proved that, the importance of a buddy, for example, so I presume you can nudge managers to make sure that each of them, as you start you have a buddy....
Dawn Klinghoffer: Absolutely. You have a new hire coming next week. Do they have a buddy yet? And all of that will be links and places to get content and more information. People will be able to see their results of our annual engagement survey through this. And so it's just one stop.
Right now we make managers go to about 50 different websites, for everything that they have to do. So to be able to go to one place, and find all of this is pretty... We think it's going to be pretty amazing. And at the same time, we're also working on employee hub.
Okay. So it's manager hub, employee hub. And so it's this notion that, how do you add value to the employees, as you said before? And so we'll think of that as well. Right now we are more focused on, the manager hub, just, we have a lot of insights and we just had a really big launch of manager expectations and values in the last couple of weeks.
And so, this is the platform in which we're using, to really enable these manager expectations to come to life through technology.
David Green: I mean, you can see where it could go. As you develop the manager hub and the employee hub, imagine as an employee, you work in sales our most successful salespeople have good relationships with these teams. We can see that you should probably network with these three people and form relationships with these people, collaborate with these people, and you'll probably be particularly more successful. And as someone who works in sales, you're clearly going to be inspired to do that.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yes, definitely. You're almost sharing our roadmap with everyone.
David Green: I haven't seen it. So, culture. Let's talk about that. So, one of the biggest challenges we come across when we speak to clients at Insight222 is how can we get the rest of HR onboard and help make HR business partners, for example, more data literate, hungry for these insights cause it actually helps them have more impact in the business. I'll be interested to understand how you've developed that culture within HR.
I know. People say, oh Microsoft is a tech company, but you had to start from somewhere. And I know, particularly the data driven HR hashtag, I think that that has helped a little bit, hasn’t it?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. Hashtag data-driven HR, which just happens to be our vision. We have taken that really seriously.
In fact, we coined it DD HR. So that is our short way of talking about it. So we have expectations for ourselves. In terms of my team, what it means to be data-driven, we have expectations for the different organisations around HR. In fact, just the other week we had one of our partners come and present from our line solutions group and she put the expectations of her role up on the screen. And there was a component of being data-driven. What does that mean? For them. We've worked with HR to build this into, as they're rolling out these, these different, roles within the organisation , there's a component of being data-driven in this, but it also takes training. And so you can't just say that and just say, go off, just be data driven. So we have a quite a training program that we offer. They're on demand, so people can just take the classes online if they want.
We have basic tool trainings, but we also have trainings on how to generate data insights, how to apply data insights, how to build business cases, understanding your audience, how to generate a hypothesis and create testable predictions. So because that's part of it. We need our clients to own their data. We don't own everyone's data. I mean, that would be really quite an undertaking for us if we owned everyone's data. So it's up to all of our partners, to own the data with us. And so when we work on projects, we work on hypotheses with them. And so if they understand how to do that, it makes it a lot simpler and smoother for us to work on that.
The other thing that we do is we try to share our insights as much as possible with the HR organisation, we try to share as much as we can outside the HR organisation as well. One of the reasons why we publish in journals like HBR, because what we found is our employees at Microsoft, they are very well read externally and they will read those articles. We also share them on LinkedIn. So, one of the ways we share internally at Microsoft is on Yammer, which is our internal social networking. And we do a hashtag data-driven HR. So we do a blog post every other week. And sometimes it's an insight that we've learned that HR could then use with their clients.
Oftentimes it's learning, tips and tricks on how to be data-driven. We've had quite a few of those in the last few months where, just teaching people just in it in a nice little nugget. Something that they can do that will help them be more successful with their business and using data.
David Green: And I guess looking to the future with manager hub and then employee hub, by effectively democratising the data, that's always a word to get out, isn't it?
By democratising the data. People see the insights of their own benefit and then maybe that helps open their minds in their day jobs when they're dealing with other people within the business as well.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. Democratising data or data democratisation, whatever. So I think that's a very dangerous word.
David Green: OK, good, we like a bit of controversy.
Dawn Klinghoffer: I think it's a dangerous word because often people will throw that in my face. In terms of, handover all the employee data. So obviously there's a lot of people at Microsoft that are very data-driven and they're all over the company, and there's a lot of very, very, I would say knowledgeable people, way more knowledgeable than me about data.
Data scientists in pretty much every organisation. But the problem is they all think they can do their job better...My job better than me at times. And, and so I often people come and say, just give me this. I know what I need to do, and I'll do the analysis. And no, we can't, you know, we can't just hand over employee data all over the company.
That's why I have the privacy person on my team. And then they say, but what about data democratisation? Yes and no. I say that with all the aspects of privacy and data confidentiality and security and even, you know, anonymising the data that's not good enough or de-identifying the data, it's really hard to get to the point where it's impossible to actually re identify. The more data attributes you bring in, the more likely it is that someone will be identifiable. And so we're very cautious about that. And so that's why I thought that word it's...
David Green: That's good. It's nice cause these terms are banded around sometimes aren't they and I think sometimes they need some definitions and thinking behind them.
You've built one of the most advanced functions in the world and I know them when we told some of our clients that you were coming to the global executive retreat, they all asked to sit next to you at dinner. So you'll be very popular over the next two days.
What advice would you give either a new Head of People Analytics or someone that's maybe taking over a function that's one or two years old? What would be the key... If you could give them three pieces of advice, what would they be?
Dawn Klinghoffer: So, for a new function, I would say start small to prove the value.
I don't know it's interesting. I don't know what it would be like to start a new function now. I know what it was like to start a new function 15 years ago. 15 years ago, no one was talking about this function. So no one had any expectations whatsoever. I would think now you might have people knocking on your door if you were starting a new function.
So maybe you wouldn't need to prove the value, but what I would say is it always takes longer than you think to do an analysis. It always takes about double the amount of time that you think it's going to take. And so build that in. Under promise, over deliver, you know, really make sure that if you're starting out, that you do something that really can link to the business value.
Otherwise, I don't know, I'm not sure that the person will come back again. So they really have to see that, someone that's been at it for a couple of years, maybe taking over a function that they'd been trying... Leverage technology. That was something that I wish that I had more of 15 years ago. We didn't have power BI. We didn't have data lakes to make it easy for us to combine all these disparate data sources. We had data silos. Oh my God. If I could just get them to put it into a peninsula, I would have been happy with like these data islands that we had all over the place.
So, you know, the technology has come so far, that you can really use technology to your advantage. And what I would say is really boost the success of your people analytics function.
David Green: So Dawn, as we begin to wrap up the conversation, let's look at the people analytics function in general terms.
What excites you most about people analytics? Moving forward, looking to the future.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. So obviously the combination of people analytics, kind of embedded in technology is what excites me the most. I think there is so much promise and future there. I do think we're just starting to scratch the surface as to what's possible.
Again, all of this in the vein of how can we help employees, managers, leaders be more successful? Be more productive, be more engaged. And, so I truly see that that's part of the future and what I'm really excited about. I'm also just excited about the sheer number of companies that have invested in people analytics.
I think, as of 2018, I think it was 70% of the fortune 1000 companies based on my friends at LinkedIn who gave me that stat.
David Green: Good to have that relationship.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yup. They have people analytics functions in their company, and that's amazing to me and I think that it will get to 100 percent. So I do think that the future of people analytics is, it's going to be like a recruiting function in an HR organisation, and again, it doesn't mean that there needs to be a large team in every organisation, technology has come so far that people don't need big teams anymore. That you can leverage technology to really help and do a lot of the work that we had to do with humans years ago.
David Green: Biggest concern?
Dawn Klinghoffer: My biggest concern is really around the privacy aspect and the data confidentiality. I mean, it's again, that because data is becoming ubiquitous and people just feel like they should have their hands on it. And you know what I love about my job, particularly at Microsoft, because Microsoft is so data-driven, I have folks all over the company that will partner with me.
So while I can't hand over our data to them, we can partner together. And that's what I like to say is there's ways for us to partner so that we're not exposing employee data in the wrong ways, but we can partner together and create amazing insights. Sales organisation is one of the ones that comes to mind where we really partnered with the sales excellence team and their BI team to deliver some really good insights to the sales organisation using workplace analytics and some of our engagement survey information cause it's not enough just to say what's gonna make a sales person productive. You also want to make sure that the sales people are engaged as well. And that kind of triangulates and brings in the human aspect or the people aspect of it.
David Green: And I guess no head of people analytics wants to be the person that sets the discipline back by either doing the wrong thing or doing something that's taken and sensationalised by some of the media, which I think there is the risk of that. You saw it in the consumer analytics space only a year ago.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Definitely. And we do model a lot of the work that we do in our people analytics function off of what we're doing with our customer data.
And so my privacy manager, she learns from what we're doing and she sits in different meetings with folks that are doing privacy all over the company. And she learns about that and then brings those learnings back to us. So that is my biggest concern because I wouldn't want it to get to a point where people analytics is dialed back because of that nature of, you know, invasion of people's privacy.
David Green: Great and I agree 100% of the fortune 1000 will have people analytics at some point in the future. I really hope otherwise that the few that don't won't be in the fortune 1000 anymore. So that leads onto the final question that I ask guests on the show and you can nuance this in any way you like, what do you think the role of the HR function will be in 2025 and beyond?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. So what, what I like in the trend that I'm seeing, and I'm seeing this, you know, obviously I can't answer about all the different companies out there, but what I'm seeing in, at Microsoft is, is the HR organisation is really thinking about the skills that we need for the future.
And, and even the universities are thinking about that, you know, it used to be that we recruited heavily from these schools, like a university of Minnesota that had a master's in HR concentration, if you would. Now we're recruiting HR professionals that have MBAs. And in those courses, they're being taught about analytics.
And they come to Microsoft hungry to be part of my team as one of their rotations. Which is amazing. But I see that there are people that have these consulting skills. They have analytics skills. They have more business skills, all across the function in a much bigger way than we've seen historically.
But, you know, 2025 is not that far away. I also think that the role of HR is becoming more and more sophisticated. OK. They truly are consultants for the business. Most companies would say their most important asset is their people. And so the fact that that HR is in every conversation about people.
Whether it's about, it's not just about performance management anymore. It's about everything, every aspect of getting the work done. That's really where I see the role will shift and it's because technology and what we can do with technology and what we can build in the everyday work that we do, and then nudging people so that there doesn't have to be an HR person that follows people around telling them what to do. Okay. We can use technology for that. Let's use our HR resources where we can have the biggest bang for our buck, which is really along the lines of these kinds of business opportunities, strategic decisions.
David Green: And arguably it's an exciting time for HR. I mean, we only have to go back a few weeks and see the business round table announcement that it's more than profit. And I think actually a lot of those companies are already doing this. They are looking at employees, they are looking at stakeholders, they are looking at the environment.
And you know, not all of those 181 companies are probably doing it to a large degree at the moment. But...
Dawn Klinghoffer: And there are many other companies that weren't part of that list that are already doing it.
David Green: I think that's a good sign and that helps... That's only going to increase the importance of HR moving forward.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, it's definitely been a focus for us for quite a while.
David Green: Dawn. It's always a pleasure. Thank you very much. Lastly, how can people stay in touch with you?
Dawn Klinghoffer: So you can find me on LinkedIn and my name's again, Dawn Klinghoffer, and you can find me as the Head of People Analytics at Microsoft and feel free to, to link in with me and you can read the articles. I have them posted there.
David Green: Perfect. And we'll share that. And I know you do a little bit on Twitter, but that's more for your other passion, which is cooking.
Dawn Klinghoffer: I don't do much on Twitter, but it is funny. People will tag me on Twitter, but I'm not a big Twitter poster, so,
David Green: So LinkedIn's the place to find Dawn.
Dawn, thank you very much indeed.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Thank you.