Episode 76: How to Build Excellence in People Analytics (Interview with Dave Ulrich, Jonathan Ferrar and David Green)
In this episode of the podcast, which sees Dave Ulrich taking my usual host chair and Jonathan Ferrar and I answering Dave's questions, we discuss some of the key messages from Excellence in People Analytics and the Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics that we write about in the book.
We also talk about the traditional HR function’s attitudes towards analytics, the skills the future HR professional needs and how more broadly people analytics will support a new approach to careers and upskilling for the organisation. Throughout the discussion, we also cover several case studies from the likes of Microsoft, Nestle and FIS.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Techwolf. To learn more, visit techwolf.ai.
Interview Transcript
David Green: So we are starting off a new season of the Digital HR Leaders podcast with a special episode where Jonathan Ferrar and I are actually in the hot seat. And we are going to be talking a little bit about our book Excellence in People Analytics and related topics. So I am going to turn over the mic to our guest host, and we are really thankful for you to be here, Dave Ulrich.
Dave Ulrich: Welcome to the show.
It's really fun to be sitting in David's seat as the guest host. Welcome to my office and to David and Jonathan. What a privilege to be the podcast host on your show, David, that is a real honour. First, let me turn to Jonathan. We have known each other for a long time, but some of the listeners may not be as aware of your background.
Is there a couple of things that we should know about you?
Jonathan Ferrar: Well, first, Dave it is great to have you hosting this and great to have you writing the foreword for our book Excellence in People Analytics. My background, I have been in HR for many years, almost 30 years now. I have worked in large organisations like IBM, Andersen Consulting and Lloyd's bank, and thoroughly enjoyed my time in various HR roles.
Probably what was interesting is that around 20 years into my career, I got offered a position in IBM to lead workforce analytics. And it was that role, that really motivated me tremendously towards this sort of digital and data future of HR. It really thrust me into a whole different way in which HR can be viewed and can contribute to an organisation's success.
Not least that I got the opportunity to move from London to New York as well, which for a Brit, was a very, very exciting time. I spent a fantastic seven years in New York and working across the United States. From my perspective, my passion moved from general HR into this sort of world of out how you can become evidence-based.
And, that is where I moved both my, career and my life, and ultimately set up Insight222 as well, along with David and others, to really focus and help chief human resource officers get more from that rich data set that exists in every organisation, the dataset of people and the organisation.
Dave Ulrich: What a great background, coming from the industry side and showing the value of evidence, the value of analytics.
Thanks, Jonathan. And David, given you are the host of the show and the podcast. Most people know you, they know you as an interviewer, but in case people may not know you well enough. What's a brief introduction to you, and perhaps more important your work outside of the leadership podcast.
David Green: Thanks Dave.
And just to echo Jonathan, thanks so much for writing the foreword to our book, it is the perfect introduction to what we have written. I have not quite been in the HR field for quite as long as Jonathan, but I have been in it for most of the last 25 years. And have been focused on people analytics for the past 8 years.
Interestingly, it was my time outside of HR that inspired me to find out more and eventually get into people analytics, which maybe tells a bit of a story. Interestingly, people analytics kind of brought Jonathan and I together as we regale in the book. We worked together in IBM, and then as Jonathan said, with others helped create Insight222, 4 years ago.
Like Jonathan, and I believe like you, Dave, I am passionate about helping HR deliver more value to the business, to the workforce and to society at large. And I believe that people analytics is vital to helping HR to achieve this particularly in this very complex and uncertain world that we currently live in.
Dave Ulrich: What a great background, and a great introduction. For people who may be just listening and not seeing I've got the book. I'm proud of it. When I saw the book, and I was asked by Jonathan and David to do a foreword, I was just humbled because it says that their work and perhaps the work of so many others is really helping shape what HR can do.
So for someone who may not yet have read the book, and I can't believe there is anyone left, who hasn't read this book, what is it about? Why did you write it?
Jonathan Ferrar: I will take that one, actually, David, if you don't mind I think this goes back a couple of ways. Firstly, what is the book about? It is about people analytics pretty much is what it says on the tin or on the front cover excellence in people analytics. It is about how organisations can be excellent and how to strive for excellence in people analytics in HR, in an evidence-based world.
So, we are really trying to bring out some of the stories and some of the messages and options that people have got to help HR become more evidence-based. That is really what the book's about how it came about. I guess you probably have to look back, about five or six years David and I met, I mean a little shout out to David, he has been the undisputed world curator of people analytics material around the world. I think it is very clear when I was a practitioner that David was the person in the world that you went to when you wanted to find out something about people analytics. He is truly marvellous. And he started writing these articles maybe six or seven years ago about, the top 10, top 20 top 30 people analytics stories, case studies, etc. And I got to know David through that, David and I met up one day literally by David writing an article and I was mentioned in it and I was super grateful. I literally just phoned David up and said, I think it would be great to meet. So we met up and we had a great conversation and the rest is history, as you might say.
And why we wrote this, especially after I had also written a previous book, the Power of People with Nigel and Sheri, was because there was so many people out there asking the one question who is doing people analytics well, and how do they do it? And so what we are trying to do is write many, many stories about where is people analytics being received, greatly by the business? And how are businesses managing to succeed with it?
And we wanted to bring that out to everyone in the world when Sheri, Nigel and I wrote the Power of People we put in some case studies. And what we found with the feedback from that book was, have you got more case studies are they more stories. And so David and I went out and found a plethora of case studies and stories, and then we put that together and really that is what Excellence in People Analytics is. It is the stories of what they have done and then options and tactics as to what to do.
If you are interested in making some of those same successes.
Dave Ulrich: Jonathan, what a great background. It is fun to see how great colleagues come together. And I, will echo your shout out to David. I relish his curation. I have been an editor before on journals and I so appreciate editors who can distill and synthesise information.
I said to people, David is the walking Google of our field and, and terrific. So Jonathan, what a great background about why you wrote it, in the first chapter of the book you start with people analytics is not about analytics it is about the business. That is consistent with where I think we have HR.
Why did you pick those words? And what is the message that you are trying to get out in that agenda,
David Green: If I take that one, Dave, It is slightly provocative, but deliberately so. And it seems to have resonated. In fact, you've done a prop we have even got, t-shirts made up with, the phrase on as well.
But I think, and I know, it is something that you have been saying. I think if there is a criticism of HR, it is sometimes we are a little bit too inward focused, and we need to be a bit more outward focused, and think about solving outcomes. So what we are trying to emphasise is, that it is critical for people analytics to directly help the business to be successful and, therefore, work on things that improve topics such as sales, product innovation, supply chain effectiveness, culture, change inclusion, the list goes on. And I think fortunately what Jonathan and I have found, and I'm sure you have found Dave on numerous occasions, is that many HR leaders think people analytics is for improving HR processes. And maybe just for reporting, what has already happened, reporting what has happened is important, but it is not the be-all and end-all. And our experience teaches us that those companies that are leading with people analytics. They are solving the problems that their business executives have got. They are focused on outcomes such as revenue and client delivery, rather than process like time to hire or attrition rates or something like that.
So our recommendation and the way we have deliberately set out the book is to organise the people analytics function and focus its efforts on the work that directly impacts the business.
Dave Ulrich: I love that start. We have done research in this space and we have done big studies with lots of data. A lot of people talk about analytics. We try to do it.
And we looked at competencies of HR people. One of the competencies is do they have competence in analytics? And what we found is it didn't connect with business results unless the focus of the analytics was on the business, measuring the activities of HR, how many people got 40 hours of training wasn't the impact. Did that training have an impact? And so, HR is not about HR. it is about helping a business succeed. I love that message. And I think this book is so powerful because of it. Now to make that come alive, you have got two choices. You got great case studies that Jonathan alluded and then you distill as David is a great curator.
What are the dimensions of those case studies? Let's start with dimensions. So across these case studies, and I know there is not just 30, I know you could do more than that because people will say, well, why am I not in the book? And the answer is you will be in the next one. But let's start, you have got nine dimensions that you distill, which one of those nine dimensions kind of jumps out at you if I'm listening to this, trying to say, how do I use people analytics to do what David just said to deliver better business value? Where should I look?
Jonathan Ferrar: Dave, I think models and tactics and things like that are very complex to sometimes get across. People often like to think analytically and sequentially, you know, I will start with this and if I go through it, then I can get there. And if I am already a little bit, mature, then I can skip the first two stages and I can start the journey a bit later. But we deliberately chose a circle as the figure.
When we asked the publisher, could you put our model on the front cover? Because the circle is really important because circles don't have a place to start and they don't have a place to stop they are continuous. You are always going around and therefore our dimensions are all represented in the same format.
No one dimension is more important than the other. And you don't start at a particular place and stop at a particular place. It is all about the journey, and it is all about the continuity. For example, we have split them into three areas; there is the foundation aspects, there is resources like people, skills, technology and data, and then there is outcomes.
There is value there is value for the people, the workforce themselves value for the business, value for the HR organisation, the culture and things like that. The purpose of the model is to say whatever you are doing, wherever you are, as a function of HR, there are things that you could do better to get more excellence from an evidence-based world.
For some people, it might be talking to stakeholders, business leaders, and asking them what they need from their people, how the people could contribute more to their business. But for another organisation, it could be that they need to implement a data strategy to bring together different data sources and make more from the raw material, the data.
And yet for others, it could be, well, we know we have got great data. we have got masses of technology. We have got a great team, but actually we are struggling to demonstrate the value to the organisation. So focus on the outcomes. We wanted to dispel this myth that everything in analytics has to start at one point and finish at another and go through a series of maturity phases and actually really represent that analytics and becoming evidence-based is for anyone and everyone.
We think there are nine areas or dimensions that you can focus on and you can achieve excellence in each of those nine and there is always room for growth. And that is why the model is circular as well. Just to emphasise that it is this continuous journey of making the function, the discipline, the, activities, always striving for more to get to that point of excellence.
David Green: Sorry Dave, I was going to add it is interesting isn't it, Jonathan. I will try to answer that question that you said at the start, what are the most successful people analytics functions doing? We find that the ones that are maybe less successful or not as successful as they could be, if that is a more polite way of putting it, they tend to focus inward-looking at the skills in their team, the data or the quality of data and the technology that they are using to do it. And they don't necessarily focus on some of those foundational elements that you mentioned Jonathan, such as going out and speaking to stakeholders in the business and finding out what they need and don’t focus on delivering the outcomes.
That can stymie their growth a little bit, which again, kind of links to the fact that all nine are important. Sorry, Dave, I interrupted you.
Dave Ulrich: No, I, love the addition because I think I know when I began our field, the first book I wrote was called Organisational Capability. And then the subtitle was competing from the inside out.
If we build it, they will come a field of dreams. And so you focus inside, then you go outside. Well, one of the last books is outside in you start outside and then come inside. And the answer, Jonathan and David, you both said brilliantly is make it a virtuous cycle. I don't really care if you start inside.
What do you do to hire and train and develop people? I'm going to get to that in just a minute, David, with, I hope a tough question. Or if you start outside, who are our customers, investors, how do we serve them? But if you can't begin to connect those two, and I think your nine dimensions allow that connection to happen, it is a virtuous cycle that builds on each other.
And that is one of the take aways that I really like. Again, Jonathan, I agree with you. I think a lot of HR people tend to start inside, which leads me to my next question. We in HR are inundated with tough issues really tough issues around social justice, diversity, racial inequality, refugees, sustainability employment, remote working hybrid work.
I mean, David, you know this list better than anybody because you curate it. We get inundated with what Steve Covey calls, the urgent we are demanded to do what has to be done. You have people at home working, get people back to work in an office, diversity, emotional wellbeing. What does analytics do to help me with that?
With all of those day-to-day pressures, what does this analytics logic do to help me?
David Green: It is interesting actually, as we were writing the book we probably wrote, 75% of it, maybe more actually after the pandemic started, we had started it before. but we did pause once the pandemic started and I am glad we did, because it has almost acted as a catalyst for people analytics and has shifted into what we talk about the next era, we call it the age of value in the book. And that very much we have seen a shift. Providing people analytics for HR, to providing people analytics for the business. And in the epilogue of the book, we talk about the future of people analytics, And I know we are going to talk about that a bit later, but we talk about things like the human experience of work, the CEO skills conundrum investor demands.
If we look at some of the moves by the SEC, for example, in the US and the ISO standard for human capital reporting and then improving society, which I think is some of those difficult topics that you have mentioned. Clearly that one is possibly the most difficult, but it is possible. In the book, Kathleen Hogan, the chief people officer at Microsoft gave a CHROs perspective just after your foreword actually Dave. And also we have got a case study from Dawn Klinghoffer who runs the people analytics function at Microsoft. And what is really interesting is they already did a daily pulse of staff.
So, they would go out to 1500 randomly selected people. Obviously not that random because they want to make sure it is representative of the workforce every day, with some questions, a continuous listening program, they stepped that up to two and a half thousand people, during the crisis.
So they were looking at. Some of the stuff that you mentioned around, remote working, coming back into the office, but they were also looking at the racial inequality challenges that presented themselves last year after the murder of George Floyd. They were able to obviously ask a different questions.
They have the capability within the team to analyse massive amounts of text, and help the organisation navigate its way through these crisis as well. By giving information to leaders, helping shape their communications, helping shape the follow-up questions that they asked to really dig deeper into how employees are feeling, but then also shaping how Microsoft approach coming back into the office, how Microsoft approaches flexible ways of working and how Microsoft approached it's response to some of the concerns that their employees had around Inequality and gender imbalance. So I think that is one area that people analytics is really helping. Another area that Jonathan and I are seeing increasingly, and you are probably seeing it as well, Dave, is where organisations are using people analytics to understand, moving beyond diversity metrics, but actually looking at inclusivity. Looking at things like homophily, which for the benefit of listeners that don't know I have written it down it is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others.
So it's that birds of a feather flock together kind of thing, and actually using people analytics. to understand that within an organisation as well. We are seeing a growing number of companies doing that, looking at passive data, collaboration, data, understanding networks, understanding. Are our teams inclusive, are our leaders inclusive and trying to highlight the real cause of issues like gender inequality as well as other types of inequality.
So I think it is quite early on. Some organisations are further ahead than others, but I think this is an area that we will see more of in the coming years. I think the appetite is there and I think the capability and the technology is increasingly there to support these efforts as well.
Dave Ulrich: I think this analytics game legacy it is about data. Giving me information. And now I think we are moving from data to information to decision-making to decision-making. That makes a difference in what a company does. Evidence-based and Jonathan has used the term already three times. it is not a brand new topic. good HR people. There are legacy people.
I think of Mark Huselid and others who have just been incredibly good at legacy and evidence in HR. So what has got to change. What has got to happen so that it is not just how much data can I collect, because at some level we get overwhelmed with data. we do another survey, we do another database. How do we make sure that the data is not just information, but that it is information that leads to better decision-making. Like you talked about at Microsoft, what a great example.
Jonathan Ferrar: Yeah, Dave, it is really fascinating. I mean, when you have been around a function like we have, for some time you see incremental steps and then sometimes you get a light bulb moment and you think that's what it is like.
I had one of those today. I had a meeting with a client. We have done some workshops with some HR professionals. Some early career HR professionals from all over the world in this client. And then we had a review session today, which was like, what have you learned?
And what do you want to learn next? I was the person that had delivered some of the training earlier, and we were just doing this review session it was, absolutely fantastic. Early career HR professional. And the question was, what did you learn from the data analytics workshop?
we did Two months ago. What have you learnt and what have you put into practice? And this lady came on and said, I as a direct result of that workshop, I went and did some analysis on employee value proposition. And we managed to change and effect the decision-making of the leadership team that I was working with.
This is a person that is a part of a HR business partner group that they are working in an organisation with multiple locations, multiple countries, etc. This lady, she said, oh, it was so good. I managed to look at some quantitative data a number of data elements. And we looked at that and then we added to that some qualitative data.
We sent out a survey I said, how did you do that survey? How did you look at the text and the comments that you got? She said, I just, got a spreadsheet. I just started with some Excel and I just started categorising things. And then I mapped that back to the quantitative data.
And I said, what was the result? What happened? And she said, it was just amazing. The executive team was so surprised. And I said, well, what happened with that surprise? She said, it just changed the conversation. We started making decisions based on the facts of the data, and they were surprised that I had managed to get so much information from qualitative data and from the sort of normal demographic data.
And she said it just changed the whole conversation. I think it is moments like that where firstly, I just get so excited. You can probably tell because it is people in HR taking an approach to using data and turned it into real life examples, helping employees, helping the business, helping the business executives think about employee value proposition, not from a load of words and comments that they just put on a PowerPoint and float about, but actually driven by analysis that can drive a conversation that can lead to action.
And it is just so exciting when you get to that point. And that is what we are trying to do, we are trying to help multiple tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand millions of HR professionals think about data that is not a scary thing. You can do it and you can look at it and you can infuse executives with that surprise moment and drive different decisions. It is just fascinating.
And that literally happened about three hours ago with me. It was just so exciting. And if we can do that multiple times, I can move into my non-work career, my non-work life, a very happy person, because that is what we are talking about. How can HR become evidence-based?
Dave Ulrich: Well, we hope you didn't just announce that you are leaving because that would be terrible.
I think you have more data to give. Can I just echo that? I love data. My PhD decades ago is on numerical taxonomy and statistics. That is my training. We love big data sets. We did a big data set and Jonathan, you will probably laugh at this. We looked at tens of thousands of people. We looked at patterns and one of our colleagues who was very prominent in the field and I won't name the person obviously looked at it and said, well, that data is really interesting, but I really think and I remember I was on the phone with a small group and I said, stop, what do you think is good?
But we now have data from 20,000 people. And I think sometimes Jonathan, as you just alluded to because everybody does HR. Everybody does HR. We all manage our people. We pay attention. I think there is something to be said with the question, how do you know, how do you know? And this analytics work we are bringing is so critical.
Now my second thing, Jonathan, I, so like your comment, there are two kinds of data. One is quantitative that data set of thousands of people is so helpful. The other is qualitative. What is your experience? What does your instinct tell you? And I think this book brings those two together in a brilliant way. We need the instinct, the unstructured data, the qualitative to get insight, which I know is part of your theme and the name of your company and the, goal It is often called unstructured data, be an anthropologist, and we need structured data.
So Jonathan, I am getting more excited than you are. I guess there is a little club, statistics, geeks unite, and we may be the only few members, but let me go back. Imagine somebody listening to this podcast, what's it for? What would this book do for somebody who listens to this and then obviously gets the book and don't just buy the book, but use the book Who is going to use it and what will they use this book for?
David Green: I mean, primarily we wrote it for the chief HR officer or chief people officer and their peers. And essentially the case studies are provided to highlight what is possible with analytics and how to use data more cleverly, in HR. I mean, it is difficult. You want the case studies to inspire.
You don't want people then to just try and go out and copy them because they need to actually learn that. The key thing about that case study is that organisation went out and found out what were the biggest business challenges facing their organisation and use analytics to help solve that. but I think they are there to inspire as well.
And I know Jonathan, obviously you had some case studies in the Power of People as well.
Jonathan Ferrar: Yeah. I think Dave, to that question, what we are trying to do is provide real stories that inspire a chief human resource officer or a business executive to say, that is what we need. We need some of that now, how do we go and do it?
And then almost to go to an HR leader, that has got responsibility or people practitioner and say, can we bring some of this alive in our company? I mean, that is why we write books, that is why you write books, that is why we write books, and that is why David curates all this material is to try and bring together real good examples.
So that it inspires people, you know, I’m sure there is that famous quote that is plagiarism is the highest compliment that you can get. But as David says, we are not looking to be able to copy word for word, what someone has done because what is good in one business might not be right for another, but we are looking for people to be inspired.
And we are looking for executives, senior executives, top executives in organisations to be inspired by these stories so that they go out and say, I want to do some of that as well. I want to change my function to deliver that sort of value to my organisation.
Dave Ulrich: I love, what you are doing, obviously and I have been privileged to participate. What we are finding, and I want to build on that a little bit. And then tell you, one of the other things I am seeing and ask a question about it is. In HR, we love benchmarking. How do I compare to someone else? Then we love best practices. Who's doing great stuff.
Then we love predictive analytics. What makes them great? But David and Jonathan, what I like about your book is you go to the next step. And when you talk about inspiring, the word we have been using is guidance. I want to benchmark, how am I doing? I want to get a best practice. I want to go learn from these 30 great case studies.
I want to be predictive. What did they do? But what I want is guidance for me. And that is what I love about your book you are moving the analytics field, not just around some great case studies that are inspiring. But around what I can do that will work in my company. Now, one of the resistance I often hear I went into HR because I liked people.
I didn't like that statistics course that math course. What if I'm not really good at statistics? What if math and analytics just scares me? I am a people person. What do I do with that then? And I get scared by that word analytics.
Jonathan Ferrar: You know, it takes me back to 1998, I was doing my diploma in human resource management at the time in a class full of 60 people and we had a statistics class, I had done statistics back in university as well. Everyone said Hey, Jonathan, why do you find this so interesting? And I got the same thing it's like, I just happened to have an aptitude for it. What interests me is the outcome. Statistics is just a tool to get to an outcome. You don't have to love statistics. You don't even have to know statistics. If you know someone that does, they can help you with that. What you really need to have is a passion for the outcome a passion, for what your business does and a passion for what makes success in your organisation.
Dave Ulrich: Do you speak a second language?
Jonathan Ferrar: Well, no, I don't actually not fluently anyway.
Dave Ulrich: Statistics is a second language. You know what? I am not fluent in French. I actually tried that with somebody I was coaching who is French.
And I said, a phrase I thought was in French and he said, what did that mean? But what you have got to have, Jonathan is enough of the language to get around. And you said that beautifully, I don't have to become a statistic expert. And there are statistics that I clearly don't understand, but you have got to have enough that you are not threatened.
Learn the basic vocabulary, know how to find a restroom in statistics. There is a lot of them know how to order coffee, know how to find directions. And then don't be threatened by it. Jonathan, I interrupted you, but I just feel so strongly. What did you study in college? I studied English, English, literature.
I mean, that is about as far from statistics as you can get. What did you study? Jonathan?
Jonathan Ferrar: I studied pharmacology.
Dave Ulrich: Oh, that's even worse than English, but don't be threatened by it.
Jonathan Ferrar: It is better to have a passion for the outcome and know a little bit about statistics and where to get the help, than it is to know loads about statistic, but not have an interest in the outcome.
Dave Ulrich: I love it. We have often used the words so that I want to do training. So that. I want to do hiring. So that. I want to have work at home. So that. And that outcome becomes so critical.
Dave Ulrich: So given, that we have now relieved the fears of all HR people, by the way, what I think you have just seen is look at three people on the phone.
None of whom are statistics experts writing about analytics. In fact, I get scared when I go into a group of statistician because they are going to challenge my statistics. And my answer is always, this is a hint for HR challenge away. I am not going to defend the statistics. I want to defend the logic behind them.
So, how do businesses use the dimensions you have come up with to really help the business and the HR people in the business make a difference.
David Green: Let me pick up all the maturity term first, and then I will let Jonathan finish. I think by the middle of the 2010’s, we can all go back. People analytics maturity models were everywhere.
We all know the one they start with basic reporting and they end up with prescriptive analytics or cognitive analytics. And I think maturity models were probably helpful in the early stages of people analytics as people became familiar with what it was. Certainly I know of practitioners who used them within their organisations, to almost describe what analytics is and could be to their leaders.
But we believe that we have reached a stage where they are now counterproductive for people analytics to be honest with you. If we think about people analytics and we think about maturity models, I think there are a number of deficiencies they imply that it's linear for a start.
You must organise your data and perfect reporting before you can do analytics. And that is not true. We have seen organisations doing both in parallel, and I think you actually should be doing that in parallel. You continually need to be looking at your dashboards and making sure that they are relevant with the business metrics.
And indeed, you probably require both if you are going to be tackling a big business problem, as well. So I don't know if Jonathan, if you would like to elaborate on how we set up the nine dimensions to operate in parallel, you have already, talked about that a little bit.
Jonathan Ferrar: Yes, we have talked a little bit about the nine dimensions. Often we get asked this question, where should we start? What should we do, etc. And of course, you go around the question and technique, but if I was just asking people to think about one thing, I would probably point them towards chapter eight in the book and say, just read about business outcomes. Just read those three case studies, and just forget what it is that you have got.
Forget what you are trying to do. Forget what you have got in terms of tools and raw materials and things like that. Just think about the business, read those three case studies and then reflect. And then you can start a page one if you want to. I would almost just jump to chapter eight first and look at that business outcome and say, what is it that the organisations have done because of this?
Because I think that gives a really solid foundation for thinking about the art of the possible from an outcome point of view.
Dave Ulrich: You know Jonathan, I really like it. I have your book in front of me for those who are not hearing this visually. And I have the picture that is on the cover. As you were speaking, I thought close your eyes and throw a dart hit one of the nine and get started.
But then I love what you said at the end. And I have gone to chapter eight, which I think is really nice business outcomes. And you have three cases, MetLife, Nestle, IBM. I love the idea of an HR person going into a business meeting and saying, as you said, what are we trying to accomplish around. here? Both with customers, investors and strategy.
And once you get that outcome clear because of what can we now bring to that discussion? What I love about the book is once you get that conversation, it doesn't matter if you are inside-out or outside-in, because you are connecting them. You have each looked at 30 firms in this book and other firms and David curates every month,
and Jonathan writes a new book every year or two. So, you have got dozens and dozens. Is there one case study that just stands out think about, a listener, a senior executive a head of HR, a senior HR person, somebody charged with analytics. Is there one case study that stands out that you would like to get that listener to pay attention to one maybe from each of you.
Jonathan Ferrar: David, I don’t know what yours is, but.
David Green: Mine’s not the same, mine is Nespresso.
Jonathan Ferrar: Oh gosh, they are all great in their own way. I will let David talk about Nespresso, the Nestle one in chapter eight, because it is truly remarkable. My personal love of that one is that use of the language and David will explain it.
Obviously you have chosen that one. I was going to actually say that one David. But the one that strikes me from an HR executive point of view. And I, will put it in the words of, if you are an HR executive listening to this, and you have been in HR for some years, you have probably been in that situation where you have redesigned a process, like an HR process.
Let’s redesign it, people aren’t happy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's do it. The one that struck me was when Isabel Naidoo from FIS, talked to us about how FIS redesigned performance management. And the great thing about it was, was that it linked very much to one of the other ones. So basically cut it very short.
It redesigned the performance management process by using both quantitative and qualitative data to really understand what the consumers of performance management wanted. The consumers of performance management are employees, they receive performance management discussions. Managers, they have to do it executives, they roll it up and have to make all sorts of things happen because of performance management.
And there are lots of debates in the world about should performance management change and exist. And, is it only a compliance thing to help, stay out of jail? Or is there something more fruitful for employee conversations and career development and things like that. But the great thing about what they did is they just use data to really go and find out what the consumers of performance management need. And then they used evidence to explain to managers, as an example, if you, have purposeful feedback conversations with employees, every quarter, you will keep your employees longer and have higher business results.
And I think that is just profound because it means that when they went to redesign performance management, they did it from using data, using the evidence and making people want to do it because who wouldn't want to use a new process that keeps your employees longer and helps you achieve better business results as a manager.
I mean, it is just remarkable. And the great thing is Dave, when I said there was another one early in the book, I think it was chapter one. If I remember correctly, there is a case study from Trimble, which talked about branding people analytics, but a subtext of that case study also talks about using data to prove that feedback with employees enables better business results.
I think it is just fascinating when you get to these case studies. I think you said it earlier, everyone is an HR person, every manager thinks they know what to do. But to have data to prove these things is just profound. I think it just makes me so enthusiastic about the future of business that I just love that.
But David, you are going to talk about Nespresso.
Dave Ulrich: David, what's your story?
David Green: Yeah. So again, very hard to choose a favourite one. It is not necessarily a favourite one, but I think it is one that I think should resonate with the audience, particularly those that aren't necessarily working people analytics roles themselves, because it talks about the power of language.
And I'm not going to do it in French, that’s for sure. It relates to Nestle's Nespresso business. It started off with a hypothesis, probably a hypothesis that many organisations have had from the HR team that the completion of a particular training course for Nespresso led to higher commercial success of the boutique.
So all of the boutiques that they have got dotted around the world. However, the analysis actually disproved that they found that the completion of the course made no real difference to boutique performance. But interestingly by doing that work, they created an energy and an interest from business leaders, to test other hypothesis with the people analytics team. The insight actually that eventually caught the imagination was that the voluntary termination of rates of the boutique manager, so the person running each of these boutiques was strongly related to boutique sales performance.
So everyone agreed that this was quite an interesting insight. The people analytics team went away and they quantified that in financial terms and then communicated this out to people in the business at various levels and it didn't land.
They couldn't understand because the financial impact was quite significant, but it didn't land. So they went away. They thought again, they thought about the business that they were serving and they reframed it from a financial benefit into the number of capsules sold in a boutique.
And this resonated with the people that made the capsules in the factories, the people that actually pushed the capsules into the boutiques themselves. Even the finance team, but it obviously really resonated with the people working in the boutiques as well and created that energy around it.
And I think what it showed is you can have all the best analytics in the world. You can get some great insights, but just as it is in so many walks of life, it is the way that you tell the story that can actually make the difference between things actually being actioned, and not being actioned. So I think that was a really good lesson really on the power of storytelling.
Dave Ulrich: What I take from that lesson is, and both of you have said very strongly that in HR, we don't start with HR, we start with the business. What are the business results that executives care about? And that could be financial, it could be number of pills, it could be innovation cycle, it could be Tobin's Q in tangible market value, it could be social responsibility.
How does what I know, and what we do in HR link to those outcomes? I think both of those stories demonstrate that. So I am going to ask a little impromptu question here. You have got a book with 30 case studies. The goal of this book is not to go get to know 30 companies. You can go to a training program and as you said, that may not have impact.
The goal is that a certain number of people create their own case study. That's for us, the evolution of, analytics. It is not about benchmarking or best practice or even predictive analytics. It is about guidance to create your case study. So, if you were talking to me and let’s assume I'm one of those targets, you are after an HR person, an analytics person, a business leader, I want to go create a case study that will help my business succeed through the analytics advice you give me.
In just one minute, and this is a bit unscripted. What would you tell me to do? First of all, you would say, go buy my book and read it through, that is a joke. But what would, and I'm filling while you each think about that, what would you tell me to do so that I can get the guidance to create a case study that works for me?
I hope these 30 case studies turn into 303,000. I mean, that is the agenda. So what would you tell me to go?
Jonathan Ferrar: I would hope that the 30 companies that are represented in the book, have another 30 case studies and another on top of that and another, and I hope everyone builds their own case studies. A case study could be as small as the example I gave earlier of the person, I was on a call with earlier today, who got some new results because they helped clarify the employee value proposition by using data to help the executive make decisions.
That is a case study. And it is perfect, because that means that some people in the world will have in the future, a better work experience a better working life. And they will therefore be happier as a person and the business will be more fulfilled. If we can get hundreds of thousands of those little case studies, I think the whole of business will be superb.
But as an executive, Dave, I would come to you and say, number one, go talk to some business executives, find out what is on their minds, and find out what they truly want to improve across the business. Then when you have got under the cover of that, understand the people aspects of that. What is it about the people in the organisation that will achieve that goal or, overcome that challenge that the executives has got. Then go look at the foundations, have you got the raw materials?
Have you got the setup of the skills operating model, things like that, get into the resources you have got, have you got the data? But I would say it's a bit like the 80/ 20 rule. I would spend 80% of the time just focusing on what is it the business actually wants to achieve because that is your case study. You don't know it at that point, but that is your case study It is what the business wants to achieve. Whether that is they want to achieve better employee experience, better inclusion, higher revenue, better customer experience, whatever it is, that is the case study. And then the rest is just work as you might say the rest is just work.
Of course just work is very hard, but once you have got to the bottom of what the business wants, that is your case study. That you are building.
David Green: I was just going to add to that actually there is a couple of case studies, actually in the stakeholder management chapter, chapter three, from Johnson& Johnson, and Syngenta, that talk about the approach that the two people analytics leaders actually took to engage directly with the business and informing the work that they did exactly in the way that Jonathan just outlined there.
Dave Ulrich: No, I really like it because I think in the hR field, in the nineties, we got invited to the table. Now the question is, what do you do when you are there? And you have both given us guidance on how to do it. So it is always scary to say, you have just spent years writing this book. but what is next?
I remember getting asked that after we did a big study and they said, so what's next? And I just thought, learn this one. But you both have crystal balls into the future because of the perches you sit on, what do you see? What is coming in the next few years.
Jonathan Ferrar: I would like to leave David to have the final say because he is, as I said up front, and as you acknowledged Dave, he is just the world's best curator.
So he has got a library, a Wikipedia in his head of stuff to set him up. I think this is about moving beyond the organisations people it is the outside-in societal impact on community. I think it is all the topics of, if I if an executive, if a CEO can help their organisation be more inclusive, be more racially accepting, be more sustainable and create a purpose in their organisation that has employees that will fit to that and it gets better.
Then if thousands of organisations around the world are doing that, then the whole of society gets better. So I know that is very big and very grand, but for me people analytics will go. It will truly go to affecting society.
David Green: Just to add to that, in many respects, people analytics is only really scratching at the surface.
Obviously in some organisations it is much more embedded than others. And I think we have seen with the pandemic, the people analytics teams, and a number of organisations have really stepped up. They are working closer with the CEOs and their boards to shape really important topics around future ways of working.
I know we are going to talk about skills a little bit in a minute. I think that what we are seeing now is people aren't asking what is people analytics, or why is it important? They are asking, how can I be better at it? How can I help upskill my HR team to be more capable and to ask some of those questions and to be more comfortable with the areas of statistics that they need to become better maybe with storytelling with data and how can I as an HR professional, have those conversations with the business and really dig into what are the challenges and then what are the people elements of that? And what can we test using analytics to help move the dial a bit?
We talked a bit earlier around the epilogue, and I see the really big opportunity, which again, not that many people are talking about is at the moment, bodies like the SEC, the securities and exchange commission are now mandating that companies disclose information around human capital.
And I do hate that term human capital, but let's just call it people data. So disclosing some of that, an investor will be making decisions about companies based on the quality of that human capital data. And I think that is the big opportunity for us in the HR field, over the next few years.
Dave Ulrich: I think there was a great quote by Martin Luther King, an American avant-garde civil rights leader. And he began a speech, that is known as the I Have a Dream speech. The first element of that speech that he repeated was “now is the time, now is the time”. And I believe that now is the time. I think that the SEC data we have been looking at that it was required. And in the last six months, 7,000 firms have reported it is lousy, The reports range from 150 words to 1500 words.
We need analytics to guide us to make those reports so that the world is better served. And Jonathan, I love your ambition. I know it's idealistic. I want to save the world one starfish at a time that old metaphor, but we are doing it. And your work is so powerful now, David, all of your podcasts with the digital HR leaders podcast.
And I hope people listen. And by the way, it is so much more fun to be on the questioning side than the receiving side. I remember when I was no longer a student and didn't have to take a test and I got to give a test. It is more fun to give a test than to take one. But you always ask this question, how can the HR people analytics identify the skills for the future?
Because that is a common question. What does this mean for the skills of our future?
David Green: Well, I will have a stab at that and then I will let Jonathan add to it. So, yeah. And this is a question that we are going to be asking all the guests in this particular series, as you both know, skills, availability is high on the CEO's agenda.
I have seen data from McKinsey highlighting that nearly 80% of CEOs are concerned about skill availability, and then that impact on innovation, cost, quality and growth. That situation has probably been exacerbated by the pandemic. So the lens is intensifying on HR, and people analytics teams, when it comes to skills.
I think Dave, you wrote something a couple of years ago, actually around how workforce planning was now becoming almost a focus on task and skills rather than jobs that we have been looking at it in the past. People analytics is at the heart of this. So just some examples, people analytics and HR is professionals working with the organisation to really understand the business strategy and translating this into skills, skills now, skills for the future. Using natural language processing for example, to infer the skills of the workforce, rather than going out and asking people what their skills are and then understanding adjacent skills to that to help people acquire those quickly, perhaps blending that with learning. Obviously, understanding from some of the external data that's out there. The volume location, availability of skills. Using this to inform strategy around site locations, for example, recruitment, learning, mergers and acquisitions.
Also, to that kind of build versus buy versus bot maybe as well in terms of understanding and skills. And I think what we are seeing is People analytics is almost helping bring traditional silos in HR, such as learning, such as mobility, such as succession, such as workforce planning together and the thread that is linking them together is some of that skills data.
We are seeing organisations now developing some of those talent marketplaces, either working directly with some of the vendors that are growing faster, they are all building some of these products themselves that actually help employees navigate their careers within the organisation, maybe working on projects where they can use some of the skills that they have got that maybe they aren’t using in their current roles to help develop some of those skills. To identify mentors to really help shape their careers within organisations. And obviously the benefit to the organisation is it helps grow those skills in areas that they need.
Jonathan Ferrar: I think back like 16 months ago, 18 months ago, 20 months ago, we had no idea of what the world was going to be like, and what all of us globally have experienced the ability that the businesses have responded to that, it has been incredibly tough for some businesses.
And on the other hand, it has been an impetus for other businesses, strangely and for employees and workers, for some people it has been terrible times, really drastic, horrible, personal, and career times. But for other people they have come out of it blossoming. There was some report in the UK that said, 20% of people have more money now than they had before the pandemic, you don't want to think of the pandemic like that because it makes you feel guilty about all the horrible things and the devastating losses that people have. One of the things that has come out of the pandemic is that work and workers are more thought about now than ever before in human history. And that is because the choices that workers have got, that people have got are now greatly exacerbated by the ability to work remotely to work differently in different things. Not every skill, not every type of business granted, I understand that.
But there are large chunks of the economy where there are different options now available to employees. And that gives businesses, different employees as well, and so I think the need for teams, HR, finance, supply chain, real estate, etc, to all work together, to really help workers and workforces manage through these different skill challenges, these remote hybrid skill challenges.
The Inability to have immigration, many countries don't have much immigration now because of the pandemic, and so there is all these challenges. But the bottom line of all of that is what David and I have seen. What many have witnessed is that the ability the use of data in the people profession has vastly expanded during the global pandemic and the need for CEOs and C-suite executives to have this sort of data, to help them know where the skills are, what are the skills they need and how to get those skills is more valuable now than ever before in any industry before the pandemic.
So now is the time for HR to quote the Martin Luther King quote, now, absolutely, is the time.
Dave Ulrich: You know, we are wrapping up our interview, but let me thank you. A number of years ago, I did a study with Arthur Young on learning, and we discovered that learning was the following definition, generate and generalise, So create new ideas, but ideas with impact. And let me thank the two of you. You have generated ideas. You are generalising those ideas through your books and your articles and your work, but its ideas with impact that got picked up as a tagline for a couple of magazines. That is the message that you. bring, it is ideas with impact.
So how do people access your ideas that will have impact? I know you have got a firm Insight222, you have got a book people should pick up. David, obviously curates every month. What could people do to pick up your ideas that will have impact as you continue to provide learning to others,
David Green: Well, the book is available, on all digital and physical retailers.
It is on all of the different Amazons that you can find around the world. And if you go to the book home page, which is Insight222.com/book, you can find out more about what we do at Insight222 as well. Just want to say Dave, thank you so much for continuing to inspire us with the work that you are doing now and the work that you have done for decades. But certainly the work that you have touched on a little bit today around the organisation guidance system. I think is definitely, as you said, a moonshot for HR and something that we are all inspired by as well. And you can follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter if you really want to as well.
Jonathan Ferrar: David is a prolific, curator follower, social media expert. I would probably say follow David, david.green@insight222.com email him, follow him on Twitter, etc. just generally though, we have a resource website with lots and lots of resources.
You can get a multitude of information off it. And it is actually very easy to remember myhrfuture.com. And if you want to enhance your HR future.com, go to myhrfuture.com.
Dave Ulrich: I am going to end my comments and I have referred to Martin Luther king. There were four phrases he repeated: “now is the time”, “we will not be satisfied”, “I have a dream” and I am going to end with his fourth one “with this dream, go back with this dream, go back.” And he said it five or six times.
I hope the discussion today is the beginning. Not the end with this dream. Go back and begin to make a difference. Jonathan, David, thank you so much for the exceptional work you have done and the best work that will be yet done.