Bonus Episode: What is the Future of People Analytics? Live panel discussion with Dawn Klinghoffer and Amit Mohindra at PAFOW

Welcome to a special episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. It features a panel discussion, which took place at the PAFOW conference in San Francisco, which took place at the end of January 2020.

One of the bitter sweet aspects of the COVID-19 crisis is that People Analytics has become even more important. As one head of People Analytics commented to me, People Analytics is truly more impactful than ever in the current crisis, it's gone from being a strategic differentiator, the best CHROs demand, to an absolute essential to manage the crisis.

In a recent article in the Economist, which compared the role of the Chief People Officer in this crisis to the role of the CFO in the global financial crisis, one of the conclusions drawn is that the pandemic makes People Analytics even more relevant. As such, there is much interest about the future of People Analytics, where it's headed and why.

This was the topic of the panel I moderated at PAFOW, which featured two of the most renowned and prominent leaders in our field. Dawn Klinghoffer, the Global Head of People Analytics at Microsoft and a previous guest on this podcast, and Amit Mohindra, the Global Head of Talent Strategy and Analytics at Wayfair.

Whilst the discussion took place before the full implications of what was then an outbreak of a new coronavirus in Wuhan, China. Much of what was said is relevant both for today and also the post world.

You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Dawn, Amit and I discuss:

• Highlights of the work Dawn and her team have undertaken at Microsoft and Amit has delivered in People Analytics leadership roles at McKesson, Apple, and now Wayfair

• Where the future of People Analytics lies, the opportunities and the threats

• The role of People Analytics in helping their organisations identify the link between employee wellbeing and company financial performance

• The key challenges that need to be overcome for People Analytics to realise its tremendous potential

• Tips to practitioners on where they can focus as they seek to develop People Analytics within their companies.

This episode is a must listen for CHROs and those working in a workforce planning or people analytics role, and indeed anyone interested in the role people data plays in helping drive better outcomes for the business, managers and their workforces.

Interview Transcript 

David Green:  Welcome Amit, welcome Dawn. It is great to see you both. Al gave you a tremendous introduction but you were both outside so you did not get to hear it so, as Al said, you two are the leading exponents in the space. You have been in the People Analytics field for quite a long time and you have both openly shared, when you can, what you are actually doing as well and I think it helps inspire everyone in this room and outside this room watching on the live stream as well.

Dawn if we start with you, can you tell us a little bit about your story. How did you get into People Analytics and why do you remain within the field?

Dawn Klinghoffer: So I love this story and sorry if you have heard this story before, but there is only one story of how I got into People Analytics, so it is the same every single time. I started at Microsoft over 20 years ago and I am a math person, I love numbers. Not so much words, but I love numbers. I was in finance and, this is the perfect story to share with people that are stressing about the fact that they don't have a five-year plan in their career. So I had had my first child and I knew that I could not work the hours that I was working in finance and so one of my former colleagues in Finance had moved over to HR to be the Head of Compensation and Benefits and he was starting this new team. Now, of course, we did not call it People Analytics back then because we did not really know what People Analytics was, but we had a data warehouse and he said, you know, we have this data warehouse. We don't know what to do with the information and I would love for you to come over here and bring an analytics capability to HR.

I said to him, will you let me work part time? And he said, sure, no problem. This is old school Microsoft, I did not interview for the job. Actually, my boss at the time is in the audience and he met me for the first time we had lunch and I said, do you have any questions for me? And he said, not really. We have a lot of work to do. So I started and it was a few years after that when I started leading the team. But my expectation was that I would go over there, work part time for a few years and then I would go back to finance. I had no intention ever of being in HR. That was just not part of my plan.

But what happened was I realised there was so much work to be done and here we are 17 years later and I still have so much work to do and I am still doing it. So that is kind of how I got into it and why I have continued to stay.

David Green:  Fantastic. Amit, similarly what got you into People Analytics and what keeps you in People Analytics because you have worked for different companies as well?

Amit Mohindra:  Yes, I have moved around quite a bit. So I like many boys and girls from India of my age, it was all about becoming an engineer. So I fulfilled my parents’ ambitions of becoming an engineer with my two levels in economics and in particular labour economics. So I found my way through a circuitous route into HR.

Initially in compensation and I was new to HR, I didn't know what it was. I looked around and I was wondering, why do we do things the way we do? What is the reason for this process of this policy? And people would just say, that it is because we have always done it this way. So I just began using my research background, my mathematics engineering solution orientation and optimisation from economics and began to look at things and come up with models and solve things. This was actually back in the previous century, if you can believe it, in 1999. I was able to convince my boss at the time, who was the Head of Compensation at Lehman Brothers, to start a new group, I would be the Head, I would get a promotion, called HR Strategy and Analysis, because at that time the word analytics was not used very frequently. And so that is when I began. Then I sort of moved back into compensation and benefits, did some other things, moved around the world. Then I was asked to start up a workforce intelligence practice at McKesson, which is a huge healthcare company, and by this time People Analytics had become not mainstream, but it was known.

So that is the first formal People Analytics job that I had. Then after that I was asked to start a People Analytics team at Apple, how awesome was that? So these two experiences of starting from scratch, a few people essentially doing reporting and building it into a true People Analytics team was really incredible.

Then I decided to just try and give back a little bit so I started a consulting company. I spent a lot of time teaching. I began teaching People Analytics at Berkeley, at Stanford, trying to raise awareness, trying to help people understand that it is not that difficult, everyone can get into it. You do not need to have a PhD. You do not need to have a hugely technical skills. I also began doing some executive coaching of people in HR leadership roles who were caught unawares by analytics and how do you lead and how do you show up as a leader in the world of analytics and big data. Also People Analytics leaders who often come to the table with numbers and objectivity and thinking that, here are the numbers they should speak for themselves, but you really need to come and show up as an HR leader, as a business leader. Eventually it is all about driving change. So, there is still lots of change to be driven in the world of HR, in the world of business, through People Analytics and that is what keeps me going.

David Green:  Great. Two slightly different routes but with a similar destination it seems. Before we talk about the future, because obviously we must not forget that the panel discussion is about the future of People Analytics, It is probably good to understand where we are today.

I put up the latest LinkedIn talent trends report this morning and People Analytics is one of the four trends on it. Employee Experience was on there as well and we all know how important analytics is to delivering the employee experience.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  Congratulations by the way, I saw the trends report before you posted it and saw that you were very much highlighted in the report, so congratulations.

David Green:  Yes so there is no bias that I am mentioning that before, so thank you. It is something I read every year so it was nice to be invited to be interviewed for it.

In terms of understanding where we are now, I mean when you both started it wasn’t even called People Analytics. So comparing what it was like when you came in to how it is now, obviously the field has accelerated tremendously, where do you feel the field is at the moment in terms of where improvements still need to happen?

Dawn we will start with you.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  So it is interesting because there are times when I feel like we have progressed as a profession tremendously and then there are times when I feel like, wow, people are still grappling with how do I get data out of the data warehouse and figure out what to do with it. So I feel like there is just such a spectrum and every organisation is somewhere along that spectrum, but what I do see happening is technology is enabling us so much more than ever before.

Way back 15, 20 years ago, we did not have Workday. We did not have Successfactors. We had an SAP version but it was not the UI that we have today. We did not have standard reports, we did not have a way to just click a button and say, yup, here is your attrition report.

But what we did have back then were questions and hypotheses and now we have a way to actually prove those hypotheses or disprove those hypotheses. Then I also think about the capability, my gosh 15 years ago, you want to talk to someone about data in HR and their eyes start glassing over like, no, no, no, no, no that is not really why I am here, I know in my gut what the right decision is. Where as now you have these HR professionals that are taking classes on People Analytics, Amit is teaching those classes. We hire folks that are getting their MBA’s and they come out of school having taken a class in People Analytics, which is incredible.

So I do feel, and these are not people that are going to be People Analytics practitioners, these are folks that want to spend their time in HR as a generalist or as a recruiter. So I really am excited about the future and like I said, there are days when I feel like we should be a lot further along, but then I look back and I feel like we have made a lot of progress.

David Green:  Amit same question to you but nuance with the great article that you wrote last year where you put the picture of some quantum physicists from the early part of the 20th century, and you pointed out how many of them ended up getting Nobel prizes. Are we going to witness something similar in People Analytics?

Amit Mohindra:  Yes, I mean it is still growing tremendously. There is more data, there are more tools and techniques and there are techniques that are bleeding in from all different fields. There are more people coming in, also from different fields, not necessarily with an HR background and they bring with them different ideas. People with a business background are coming in more and more and I think we are switching towards more of a business orientation. I think you always started with strategy and end up with outcomes but it is always business outcomes and I think the field is maturing from just focusing internally on HR to now focusing on the business, I think that is a huge evolutionary step.

David Green:  So in a way, People Analytics is changing HR for the better.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  I would hope so. It is actually making people think differently, that is what I am noticing. It is really making my HR partners think differently and change the way we talk. I love what Amit said about business outcomes because that is something that, I probably sound like a broken record I use those two words together far too often, but it is because that is the North star. What is the outcome that you are trying to drive and it is a business outcome and even engagement can be a business outcome. So it is not when you say business outcome that it has to mean revenue, there are so many different types of business outcomes that you try to drive.

David Green:  So it is already helping HR increase its impact and be more, as you said, more outcome focused than maybe it has in the past.

Amit Mohindra:  I think it is a totally different function than what it was even 10 years ago.

David Green:  So this morning we had Jeffrey Pfeffer on stage talking about some of the research behind his, Dying for a Paycheck, book. He said that his biggest wish was that more companies recognise that there is a link between employee health and company financial performance. Do you think we are doing enough as a field to do that at the moment? I am not going to talk about your individual companies but maybe you have done some stuff to look at that.

Do you think that is a real challenge for the field to try and meet moving forward?

Amit Mohindra:  I think it is. I think we are in the business of discovery, of discovering relationships and insights that can tell us what we need to do. Jeffrey, he had all sorts of data to back up the fact that there is a big problem, a huge problem, but I think he also pointed out why things that are not happening.

The free market, people's choice, it is such an intractable problem, but I think the more you can chip away, the more evidence you can provide, the better chances there are to find some sort of gap or crack to get in there and begin to attack the problem. But, I think just from my own personal experience, you have to be so careful about not getting completely sucked in by work. I think it can get to the point where you have to worry about health for sure.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  So my plane was two hours late today. I was in the airport. I was live streaming PAFOW so I was able to see the first part of his talk, which was really exceptional. When he was talking it kind of reminded me of one of my favourite insights that we have gotten at Microsoft and this is an insight that actually we have seen, I have talked to other companies and they have done the same type of work and are seeing this as well. and it connects. It is about collaboration overload. So, as Amit said, you can let yourself get consumed with work and so we have a way to look at calendar and email metadata. How many of you spend a lot of time in email? Okay, so I think almost every person raised their hand. We are obsessed with email at Microsoft. I used to think that we were obsessed with it because we created outlook but what I have realised is we created outlook for a lot of people and everyone is obsessed with outlook or email, it does not matter if you are on outlook or not. So what we did was we wanted to understand the effects of email on your perception of balance, of work life balance. So we did this type of correlation and we did it in two ways. One, we looked at emails from your manager. So getting more emails from your manager do you start to feel like your work life balance is not so good? And the answer is yes. Actually we peel the onion a little bit and said, is it different depending on the job that you have? So are engineers actually more tolerant of emails than the salespeople?

The answer is no. Salespeople are more tolerant of emails than the engineering folks because the engineering folks want to be in their office coding all day, they do not want to be bothered with emails.

Then we also looked at just kind of general email overloading, after hours. After hours is the key there.

So the story that I like to tell is, I am busy and in meetings all week and so it was always, I was so guilty of this, every Friday I would go home and I would spend probably two or three hours cleaning out my inbox so that on Monday morning I could go in and hit the ground running.

I never stopped to think about the impact that I was having on everyone else on those emails I was sending because people would wake up on Saturday morning, even though I did not ask them at all to do anything over the weekend, the perception is you have to work all weekend because you have all these emails.

I love that we were able to prove that, that it actually does have quite an impact on your work life balance, the number of emails that you get after hours, that we have built it into one of the products that we have within outlook. So that it actually asks you, really, are you sure you want to send this email right now?

Because this is the impact that you are going to have on people.

Work life balance is real, people that have a perception that their work life balance is not good, that can impact them bringing their best selves to work every single day. So we do want to figure out all of those different ways that we can address that.

David Green:  Is that one of the things about what People Analytics can do? It can give insights and actually help change behaviours through those insights. So there is the example at Microsoft you probably do not send so many emails on Friday night now and if you do, you queue them.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  Yes I will schedule them, but then you do not want to schedule all of them to go out on Monday morning either, because I am sure that will have another type of unintended consequence.

Amit Mohindra:  It is all about behaviour in the end, so it is behaviour, it is action. That is where we often find this gap between you get the insight and then you try to drive the action. That is one of the biggest nuts to crack in this field. How do you ensure that the action actually happens?

David Green:  So let's look to the future. I am going to come to each of you with similar questions so hopefully you have got different ideas. Let us roll forward maybe five year’s time, what do you think will be some of the People Analytics work that we will be doing? I know it is tied to a business problem, so forget about the technique a little bit, but where do you see the practice going from a positive side and maybe what concerns you as well?

Amit Mohindra:  So again, I think there is going to be a little bit of a divergence in terms of People Analytics teams right now are getting bigger and bigger because you need to start with something that can establish standards, can set up the infrastructure. What I think is going to happen is that these teams will begin to dissipate. The centre of gravity will move outwards into the regions, into the functions. Ultimately you do not need necessarily People Analytics teams because analytics is pervasive. Everyone in HR and beyond is thinking of it in terms of thinking of everything, decisions and actions in terms of analytics, choices, strategy.

So the information will be available through various tools, kind of pervasively everywhere in every device and you may not need any more central group to look at it. So you are going to have this optimisation everywhere around you, you do not necessarily have to have a group that is doing it.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  See, I disagree.

David Green:  Good, it is always good to have a slight disagreement on a panel.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  So I agree with the first part that it is pervasive and that it is going to be everywhere, but I think it is these analytics teams that are going to come up with the different behaviours or insights to actually build into this type of whatever it is, technology. So if you do not have those teams, this is one of my pet peeves is that you read an insight somewhere and you say, oh okay, well this company did that, I am going to implement those changes at my company and I am going to see the same type of business impact. But that is not true because every company is different.

You can not just assume that one company has done something and it is going to be the same everywhere else. So I would position that back to what you said is that, while we can buy technology off the shelf and hope that many of the algorithms that are in the background of that technology work for your company, there is going to be nuances.

So you are going to need to still have these humans that are coming up with these hypotheses, testing them and then you will build these customisations within the technology. Okay, so does that mean that every company needs to be a technology company? I do not know, but I am starting to read that every company is starting to become a technology company. So…

David Green:  It is funny because Jeffrey Pfeffer said this morning that every company was in the healthcare business, so we are all multifaceted now. Then we have seen a bit of a move towards some People Analytics teams are either merging or working much more closely with their colleagues in other analytics teams. Is that a progression or does that depend on the organisation? Are we going to be seeing more closer collaboration between different analytics teams?

Amit Mohindra:  Absolutely. I think the word community of practices is used often in this situation where you have different groups doing analytics of a different flavour, but there is always room for collaboration. You can use the same model in one situation as in another with a little bit of tweaking. You can share technology licenses and save money that way.

Cat and Aaron from Wayfair presented earlier today, they presented on topic modelling text analytics tool and they also mentioned that they had worked with some of our data scientists in the field that are looking at text analytics of customer feedback and other things. So there is a lot of opportunity to collaborate and learn from one another.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  Yes, I definitely agree with that. In fact for our topic modelling tool we actually went to the marketing team and the team that were mining data from customers and we said, we know that employee sentiment is different than customer sentiment, but we are going to start with that base model and then we will adjust it.

So that, again, back to my point of there are just these nuances and everything is just not completely transferable.

David Green:  No. I know you have been doing some work at Microsoft around this and I think you have done something previously where we can actually use data to empower the workforce a bit more by giving them insights about themselves that helps them with their own career development, like some of the products that we are seeing that support career pathing. But you can even give them insights about their own behaviour and how that might impact negatively or positively on their teams. Do you think we will see more of that?

Dawn Klinghoffer:  Gosh, I hope so. I feel like that truly starts to really empower people to own their own data, own their own actions and behaviours, but you give them the tools to see how you are having an impact.

Amit Mahindra:  The evolution of People Analytics on people to People Analytics for people, and I think it is going to progress to a point where there is going to be a rebalancing of the power equation because I think people will become more aware of the power they have over their own data. Also you are going to see some difficulty in trying to extract that data and use it, especially if it is not for the sole benefit of the employee.

David Green:  We will come back to that point in a minute. I think someone in the audience has got a question, I think it is Gene.

Audience member:  Hi, I am Gene Pease, Amit, Dawn, great stuff. David, thanks for your contributions for all of this. So David, you showed up statistics this morning that was 69% or something of large organisations that you defined as 10,000 more employees had People Analytics departments.

I think there is over 10,000 companies in the US that have between 5,000 employees and 10,000 employees, so below your number, that I believe are just starting this People Analytics journey. Based on the experience up there, how does a company that has, many of these companies are not Silicon Valley, they have got a lot of blue-collar retail not hi-tech workers, how do these companies, based on your experience how do they get started? Where would they get started first? How, like you did many moons ago, but now you have got this amazing array of technology, all these shiny new objects, lots of different ways to look at things. How would you get started today if you were taking over a company of 2000 employees that had 300 managers and 2,700 workers and factories and truck drivers? Does that question make any sense?

Amit Mohindra:  Yes, yes it does. I think it is a valid question. It is a question that often comes up, what is the size of company you have to have in order to have a People Analytics team?

I would say at least 50 to 60 people before you can do something. And remember, it is not necessarily always quantitative research, it can be qualitative research as well. So there is that aspect. But starting out I would suggest that people focus on the data and the sources of data and beginning to make sure that they set in place processes and thinking that will make analytics easier going forward. So you have an opportunity at the early stage to set the conditions for being able to do People Analytics.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  Then what I would add is pick something that is super important to the leadership team, to the senior folks in the organisation, look at the strategy, ask what do I actually have available to me to influence and to steer into the right direction with a very clear business outcome.

Also if you can just pick one because the problem is sometimes you just spread yourself too thin and you say, Oh I can do this and this and this and then none of them actually get done.

If you can get one done you start to pull people in, they start to realise that there is power here and I am going to come and ask more. So I always say start with one, just one.

David Green:  And it does not need to be the most sophisticated analytics. It is all about the insight and the problem isn't it, that you’re trying to solve.

Amit Mohindra:  You want to have people come to you, rather than you pushing stuff onto them, you want to have a pull and people want you to come and look at a particular situation or give some guidance on what you are seeing.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  I feel like that is when we knew that we had something going when we stopped pushing.

That is when we started getting inundated and we had more work than we could possibly do, then we had to start prioritising. It was no more like the shopping around like, Hey, do you like this? Where can you use this? So that I think for those of you that are in the midst of it, if you can get to that point, you know you have something.

Al Adamsen:  So if I might just jump in, a couple of things before I ask my question, we have about 10 minutes left and this is your time so if you have any questions for Amit or Dawn, by all means T them up and let's get this going and then we will go for drinks.

So my question is this. When I first started in this field, and I know the case is true for both you Amit and Dawn, is that it was a part time job. In other words I got a lot of responsibilities and had to go do research, go figure something out. Now given the nature of the work, the proliferation of data, all these tools, it is a full time job and then some now there are teams. However CHRO’s and others with budget do not appreciate that fact and we are not, I would say we are by and large as a discipline under-resourced.

So my pointed question is, if you believe that or not run with me for a second, how do we as a discipline command additional resources, whether it be headcount, whether it be budget for some of these cool tools? How do we build sustainable capability? In four minutes or less, no, I am just kidding.

Amit Mohindra:  So in my experience, you are right. Headcount is always tight and especially HR headcount, seen as a cost. So in my experience, if you can deliver results and products for businesses, they will invariably come to you with heads and funding. You can then use those resources to build and then you can expand delivery even more. It sort of accelerates after that. So if you can demonstrate value, then people will give you more resources.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  And I agree 100% and another way, just to add on to that, is look around the organisation. There usually are pockets of people doing similar types of work around and if you can make a case to bring people in, to centralise and have more fungibility with the resources, you can often also get additional resources that way.

You are not talking about net new resources for the company, but you are thinking about how to orchestrate things in a different way.

David Green:  And is that also to your earlier point Dawn, about finding that business problem that surfaces with the senior management team, because then you are more able to pull those resources together.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  Yes and that is one of the challenges, right? That is why I love the fungibility of resources and having that kind of centralised function because there are times when you need a lot of resources on one area. Maybe your recruiting function is getting ready to make a big change or your global diversity and inclusion team is about to spend a lot of money on a certain program and you need to help with that. You can shift resources around where it needs to be at the time depending on the rhythm of the business or whatnot. When you do not have that, it makes it very challenging.

Amit Mohindra:  And then also a small team is actually quite a luxury as well.

So if you have a small team, enjoy it because it gets harder as the team grows. But a small team allows you to prioritise and it also forces you to be creative in doing things so there are some advantages too.

Audience Member:  Hi, I am Nick Garbis from One Model, as of Monday. Hi Dawn and Amit.

In the future of work I see that we are going to have teams that are pretty dynamic and agile working structures and things where the work they are doing may not be for your direct manager or even working with your direct manager very much. What are your thoughts on what analytics will look like or be needed, to handle this more free form structure of work?

Amit Mohindra:  So you are just saying that the reporting relationships are more dispersed and teams are short lived and sort of fluid?

Audience Member:  Exactly. Short-lived teams. So I might have the same boss for five years, but my work has been done on six different teams and I see my boss once a month.

Amit Mohindra:  I think if you can tag all of those different situations and instances and timing, then you can begin to look at that. So I would say tagging would be necessary, having stuff baked into some sort of HRIS.

Al Adamsen:  Okay. I am going to jump in and ask one more question.

As we talk about the future of work, which again is a somewhat a catch phrase, but it is real, right? And it is always going to be real and it is shifting. We have AI, globalisation, gig economy. The nature of work within organisations is changing.

Right now there are not many functions or governance bodies that are systematically looking at how work gets done. So my question is, I have a line of thinking that People Analytics is uniquely positioned to facilitate a discussion around the future of work. If you believe that, how do we build a coalition of disperse functions to actually systematically get after how work is going to get done? I am talking about IT, I am talking about legal operations, so we are actually thinking systematically and not jumping over each other as we go over time.

If you can comment on that, I would be interested.

Amit Mohindra:  I agree with you Al.

Al Adamsen:  How about you Dawn? Do you think it is going to happen? Or is it that if we go down two or three years, are we going to be saying the same wishful thinking or do you think it is actually going to happen that we are guiding those types of discussions?

Dawn Klinghoffer:  I mean, gosh, two years I think is a lofty goal, but I think it will happen.

I think about the cultural attribute we have “one Microsoft”, so what you are articulating is what is our aspiration, “one Microsoft” that we operate as one unit. That is a lofty goal for an organisation the size of ours, but that is the goal.

Audience Member:  Jeff Higgins, HCMI. I guess an add on to your question and comment Al and also some of the future of work. What do you think about future standards in terms of reporting as a standard and do you believe in that and do you think that is actually going to have an effect?

Because if you look at Finance, which has accounting standards, they do have resource challenges as well, but not in the same vein where teams get pulled apart and redirected all the time. They tend to be able to get what they need to get things done because they have to put together annual reports and submit information to shareholders that HR currently is not doing.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  So I will tackle that one. I feel like, so of course you would ask that question. I know you are very much on the forefront of all of this and I agree with you. I do not know when it is going to be like an SEC requirement but what I would say is transparency is a big deal right now. If you look at the external release that Microsoft had with diversity and inclusion, we feel obligated to our employees, to our shareholders, to release that type of information and it was a big big release this year. We included a lot of things that we had not included before and that kind of goes to your point. I think that it is going in that direction.

Will it be a requirement for the SEC? I do not know but I think it will be something that companies feel like they are obligated to do.

Amit Mohindra:  I think it is an opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves and also start moving in this direction of demonstrating what the benefits of being an employee there are, from a diversity standpoint, from a health standpoint. So I think when companies are forced to do it there is a certain kind of reaction and maybe this is what Al was referring to in his earlier question about People Analytics sort of creating that coalition or a mode of force to try and drive this change in the sense of moving a society and organisations towards a better future.

David Green:  And is there a shift as well with the Business Roundtable announcement at the end of last year? I am sure it is good PR as well, but it is an interesting statement to say that we now care about all stakeholders, communities, employees, and stuff. Then you are going to have to start reporting on it.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  But I love what Amit said, it becomes different when all of a sudden it is a requirement. That is what I truly love about the fact that we ourselves decided that we wanted to release more information and be more transparent with our employees and our shareholders.

No one was telling us we had to do that. That is where I feel like you can start to understand the companies that are truly thinking in that way and the ones that are kind of saying, mm, not so much. What I would say is looking externally there are a lot of companies out there that are releasing a lot of information and again, there is no SEC requirement for these companies they are feeling like it is good for everyone to understand this.

David Green:  I know you are both passionate about doing the right thing with People Analytics and being transparent and open and this is being transparent with people data effectively, isn't it?

Getting that trust from the workforce.

Audience Member:  First of all, thank you so much for sharing your experience across such a longitudinal study of experience because it really highlights how important and how far People Analytics has come.

I have a background in analytics, but now I like to see how it can expand just passed where we are right now. And in saying that I wanted to connect what was being said over here with what Al was mentioning and that is this coalition, right? Do you guys think that there is the potential for it to professionalise in that People Analytics becomes a profession so that you could have a People Analytics in sports?

Right now I have psychology, so I can leverage it differently and I can sort of blend it but wouldn't it be cool if instead of just a coalition, we professionalised it and just made it something. And to the extent with whether or not it is done through SEC regulation or coming up with standards, which by the way, Deborah Weiss is speaking on that whole thing tomorrow. Just formalising it so it is something that is recognised and not just a mishmash of people who are like minded and trying to push things forward.

Amit Mohindra:  Wow, so I have not thought about that, frankly. That is a great question. On the one hand, certainly some degree of standards, a body of knowledge and I am thinking about this as a teacher, trying to equip new people coming to the field. What do they need to know and what do they need to know how to do? But I worry about this point about trying to professionalise People Analytics. I think it might be more exclusionary and would, at this point, perhaps constrict growth and innovation.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  I like to think that it is the analytics profession that we need to really focus on and People Analytics is just one aspect of the analytics profession. There is so many different aspects of the analytics profession I actually like being part of this analytics profession because I do think, and we already kind of talked about this, the future is going to be, it's not just about the people data.

You are going to need tons of data to really tell the story and so to really create that niche that that is its own profession, I think could hinder things a little bit.

Amit Mohindra:  If you just take the example of this conference, which has been going on for many years, you have people from many different fields, many different backgrounds.

If you were to say you have to have this designation or you have to test for this designation, I think it would choke off a lot of connectivity.

Al Adamsen:  It is a great insight. That is certainly food for thought because we do have an evolving space and I do like what you both said personally.

But I will land with this, is that we have a bunch of younger people and some of whom are going to be here tomorrow who aspire for careers in this space and we all have entered this space from what I would call, our structure of interpretation, whether it be economics, psychology, IT, finance. So I echo you both, what you said is that that diversity is really a strength that we can continue to leverage.

And I was really taken by Sarah O'Brien and her title, I believe it used to be Global Head of Talent Insights at LinkedIn but now it is Global Head of Insights at LinkedIn now so I think it amplifies what you are saying, that we are heading that way.

Any final comments? Dawn and Amit before we head upstairs and enjoy the evening?

Amit Mohindra:  I would just say thank you for sticking with us so long. I know we’re the barrier between you and drinks. Thanks for the questions.

Dawn Klinghoffer:  I would definitely echo that. It has been a long day and I am sure for all of you sitting here, but it has been, from what I hear, it has been a really amazing day. I would also say just for those of you that are more in the beginning stages, think about that one business problem that you are going to help your organisation with and think about the data that you need and how you can really have an impact.

David Green:  Thank you both very much.