Episode 92: Developing a Data-Driven Culture at Standard Chartered Bank (Interview with Steve Scott)
This week’s podcast guest is Steve Scott, Managing Director and Global Head of Workforce Management and Analytics at Standard Chartered Bank, talking about the critical importance of developing a data-driven culture in HR, in order for people analytics to deliver sustainable value to the business.
Throughout this episode, Steve and I talk about:
How the field of people analytics is evolving
Building an effective talent marketplace that functions in a hybrid work environment
The transformation of people analytics at Standard Chartered, to a value adding function
How to ensure that the field continues to address business challenges and the future of people analytics
The role of the CHRO and the people analytics leader in developing a data-driven culture for HR
Support for this podcast comes from Medallia. You can learn more by visiting https://www.medallia.com/employee-experience/.
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.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Steve Scott, Global Head of Workforce Management and Analytics at Standard Chartered, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Steve, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and also share some details on your role at Standard Chartered?
Steve Scott: Absolutely. Thank you David, and thank you for inviting me along today. By way of an intro, Steve Scott, as you say. Head of People and Analytics at Standard Chartered. My background really has been predominantly financial services, I dread to say it, but now over 20 years in financial services. has been across different divisions, so it is time spent in private banking, retail banking, insurance and wealth, corporate banking. And in multiple disciplines as well, so everything from sales and distribution, finance, product management, operations. So 20 years in that kind of environment and I now describe it as my 20 year apprenticeship, which led me into my first HR role and my first people analytics role at Lloyd's Banking Group a few years ago. I spent a couple of years there before moving across to Standard Chartered, just over two years ago now.
So a little bit of an unusual background if you like, but I really get a lot of value experience of working with the business, bringing that business perspective, that commercial focus, if you like, and making sure that we always looking the value opportunities in people analytics.
David Green: Yeah. We always say that people analytics is really problems for the business and so I imagine having a background in the business, particularly in the same industry in which you are now doing people analytics, is a great help.
Steve Scott: Absolutely. I have been in those roles. I have experienced those business challenges myself, so I can speak the business language, if you like, and then translate that back into my team. With others, of course, who are fulfilling that kind of partnership role with our HR colleagues and business colleagues, but yes bringing that sharp commercial focus, that business awareness, has been really important for me, both in my time at Lloyd's in this role and obviously now with Standard Chartered.
David Green: Great. Well, we were going to talk a little bit more about the work at Standard Chartered. What are some of the big changes and business challenges that you are seeing impact your role in HR at Standard Chartered at the moment? There is lots going on isn’t there?
Steve Scott: There is a lot, yeah. And actually before we have been able to deal with these challenges, we have had to be on a bit of a transformation journey within my team that were predominantly focused on hindsight reporting, operational reporting. So we set out on a really exciting transformational journey, multi-year, that will allow us to pivot away from focusing only on the hindsight reporting, but supplementing that now with more insight and more analytics. So I talk about the hindsight, insight, foresight model that we are trying to build. We are well progressed on that journey now thankfully, because the business has got lots of really fascinating challenges and opportunities for us to wrangle with and support. I don't think we are unique at Standard Chartered that a lot of our time is occupied thinking about the future of work and the re-imagination of work, where will work get done? What work will get done? How will it get done? What skills do we need to think about for that new work in the future?
So a couple of big things that we are working on at the moment, one for example, is understanding more deeply working practices. Particularly as they are evolving in a more flexible, hybrid world and trying to understand exactly how those working practices are correlating with colleague sentiment, around how they feel. What is the difference in their perception of coming to work, the employee experience if you like, when they are working hybrid, when they are working remote, or when they are working purely from an office.
And then how does that insight on working practices and sentiment towards working practices, how does that help us understand the connection between business and colleague outcomes?
Because if we can get to understand that, then we know which levers to pull to drive better outcomes for both colleagues and of course the business.
So that is really fascinating work that we have been working on for most of 2021 and into 2022. Another one that we are working on, again related to the future of work, is around strategic workforce planning and trying to understand in more detail, more granularity, the future composition of our workforce, not just its size, but its shape, its skills, and the spend attached to that future workforce. So we are getting into really being able to identify which roles we would call sunrise. So these are the new roles that we are going to have to grow, across the organisation, to help us deliver our strategic goals, as well as sunset roles. So which are the roles that we are not going to need as many of, or any of, in years. And then fascinatingly, by looking at skills adjacency across those different types of roles, being able to identify talent pools of colleagues who are maybe in sunset roles, but have got a lot of overlap with some of the skills that we need for the sunrise roles. And so through some POCs, proof of concepts, we have been able to look at these cohorts, put them through a re-skilling program to support their redeployment into these sunrise roles. It is a fantastic, massive opportunity for colleagues to build a more sustainable career and real focus on their up-skilling and re-skilling. So great colleague benefit, but clearly a commercial benefit as well in terms of the saved costs in exits and hires. So really good example of a win-win, that this is great for colleagues and great for the business.
David Green: Well we will definitely come back to the skills question in a bit, I just want to talk about the first one. in many respects, we are in this huge experiment at the moment, every organisation in the world, around remote, hybrid, in office, working and it is so important that analytics is part of that conversation, isn't it? Because there are lots of opinions around how many days at home versus how many days in the office and there is no simple answer for this. Even in the same organisation, even in the same team sometimes, because some of it will come down to employee preferences and to how teams operate and it is so important that analytics is involved in that.
Steve Scott: Absolutely. And we were brought in really early as part of that journey. We made the very bold, courageous decision, at Standard Chartered, that we wanted to offer increased levels of flexibility, the opportunity to do hybrid working. So this is not work that I am doing to validate that decision or to test for whether or not that was the right decision, we have made that decision and we are going for that. It is more to understand how working practices are evolving so we can optimise from that decision, how do we make sure it is really adopted and embedded into our organisation again, for the benefit of our colleagues and for the business. We want to drive productivity of course, we want to do it in a way that supports our colleagues from a wellbeing perspective, from a growth and development perspective, that they still feel included, part of the corporate culture. So really exciting stuff. And the way I kind of think about it is, how do working practices inform people, productivity, performance, and culture. And it is those four lenses that we are looking at this through.
David Green: And of course then it is a whole workplace itself, so if we are going to be in a more hybrid world, are we going to use workplaces differently from how we have used them in the past? Is it going to be for more collaborative and innovation work, obviously customer work as well. And how do we design our workplaces differently to actually foster that collaboration and innovation?
Steve Scott: Yeah, absolutely. Workplace design is critical. So property teams are part of this discussion as well. Right now we are asking colleagues, when you are doing different types of work, which location best suits the type of work that you are doing on a day to day, a week to week, basis? So we can use that insight then to shape that workplace design and the way that work is designed for the future.
David Green: Fascinating. So people analytics is a great place to be because there are just new things coming in all the time that we are working on as a function.
So let's continue to talk about COVID, unfortunately we do have to talk about COVID still at the moment, and then look more into the skills area. If we look at the impact of COVID, which has been significant again on every organisation different times sometimes in different geographies, and the need for more rapid talent deployment within organisations.
Can you share some more of the detail around the work that you have done to build a talent marketplace at Standard Chartered? And how you are addressing that re-skilling challenge that you talked about?
Steve Scott: Yes. You are absolutely right. COVID accelerated us towards some of these themes around the future of work. Talent Marketplace is something that we launched as a pilot initially, it was driven by we could hear from our colleague listening, colleagues wanted more opportunities for growth and development. And we felt Talent Marketplace would be a great way to do that. To allow them to put themselves forward, to kind of say, look, these are the skills that I want to learn, or these are the skills that I want to offer deploy in a different part of the group, to build my organisational awareness, whatever it might be, but from a colleague's perspective. So we launched that initially in a few countries and it was a huge success. We could see the active participation of colleagues in those pilot countries but what we could see was, not only we were able to match these opportunities with colleagues, but it was starting to foster a real culture of talent mobility which we wanted to foster and to nurture that. So we made the decision then to go global, and it is still fairly early days, but we have now got over 11,000 registered users. We have completed over 500 project assignments, colleagues matched with projects, if you like. And we have translated that into additional productivity hours. So that is all discretionary effort, if you like, that Talent Marketplace has created.
So it absolutely meets the colleagues needs that they were asking for. We are creating this environment for them to tap into opportunities to support their development and growth. But through it, we are finding considerable productivity gains, so all of this extra discretionary effort, that teams are finding all this capacity and capability where they may have had shortfalls. So really powerful stuff.
We have even now opened that up to mentoring relationships. I think as of today, we have had about 200 or 300 matched mentors to mentee’s, again helping those colleagues with that growth and development opportunities. So Talent Marketplaces has proven to be really successful for us.
Re-skilling, I think if we then look at strategic workforce planning, this is again back to the points I made earlier. It is around, how do we understand the future evolution of our workforce? How do we understand where the roles are going to be automated through technology? How they are going to be augmented through technology? Or, what additional roles are going to be required to support the embracing of technology? And then looking at what that means in terms of the capabilities, that result from those changes. But it is all that foresight, I have talked about hindsight, insight, foresight. This has given us a two year, three year view, to give us time to build the appropriate interventions that we need to make sure that there are no gaps, that we have the workforce that we need in the future. And it allows us to do it in a way that is as employee centric as we can possibly make it by providing re-skilling opportunities, redeployment opportunities. Leveraging from Talent Marketplace is one of the channels that we can use to build that capability out.
The two are really intrinsically linked actually and what is really fascinating for me, I think we are still exploring, is how we can connect the two because if strategic workforce planning can give us that global view if you like, the high level view, of how the workforce is evolving and changing then Talent Marketplace becomes a channel through which we can start to create that future workforce. Yes, we can deploy talent where it matters most, in terms of the capacity and capability shortfalls that we have got, colleagues are getting the benefit of the learning and growth opportunities that presents, and we are getting all of that productivity uplift as a result.
So again, it is really a win-win because we are building the workforce that we need to for the future, in terms of capabilities, but we are doing it in a way that is colleague centric and it is business centric because it is supporting increased levels of productivity.
David Green: It is interesting isn’t it because Ian and I, Ian the producer of the show by the way, were talking about how using skills as the data source almost helps break down traditional silos in HR, learning, talent development, strategic workforce planning, because it is the common data source that could underpin all three of those in the future. We had Anshul Sheopuri from IBM on the show a few weeks ago and he talked about skills as a silver thread that links all of this together. But that skills data, obviously people analytics teams are going to be at the forefront of that, doing the work that your team has been doing around understanding skills adjacencies, for example. And as you said, driving internal mobility, which is great for colleagues, great for the business as well. And then great for the foresight piece that you were talking about, because then you can understand, okay, we have got a good understanding of what we can grow and what we can build. So now we probably understand the gap better, we can understand about where we might need to buy talent, in the future, and we have got data that tells us where we could potentially buy that talent from because the supply is in abundance, in different parts of the world, where Standard Chartered is.
Steve Scott: Totally. And I think, SWP, strategic workforce planning, in the same way as any insight or analytics piece of work, it is only of any value when it is translated into actions to drive the impact that you are seeking. Talent Marketplace in many ways, is the mechanism by which you can convert strategic workforce planning insights into actions that directly impact colleagues positively, to support their re-skilling growth into the future roles and the future skills that we need for our organisation.
David Green: Yes and as you said, it has been accelerated really over the last two and a bit years, since the pandemic started. We have had lots of people on the show that have talked about how it has fast-forwarded the future of work by five or ten years. But actually it has, it sounds like a trite statement to make, but it actually has.
Steve Scott: Totally. I think the points I would make around Talent Marketplace is, it is another source of data to help us understand the future skills and capabilities for our organisation, because it is coming from the colleagues, it is coming from the teams who were saying, I need more of this skill and I need more of that skill. So we absolutely look at the inputs from all of the teams who are putting projects up onto the marketplace and looking at the capabilities that they are asking for. We are then validating that against what we are seeing with the SWP that we are doing at the organisation level, to see if there is anything that we are missing. So it is a great way to get the colleagues' view of future capabilities, or at least capability gaps as they see them today.
David Green: And also it moves us away from that kind of fixed mindset around a job to actually, what are the skills that I have got as an employee. And yes okay, I will spend 75% of my time doing this, but maybe 25% of my time, because I have got these skills, I can be doing some of these other projects rather than just doing one job in one place.
Steve Scott: Yep, yep. Just changing the way that work gets done. Fantastic.
David Green: Yeah. Well, I think this is going to evolve more over the coming years.
You talked about the people analytics field in general and your team in particular, as you described earlier, being focused on the transformation journey and moving from a reporting or hindsight function, to a value adding, insight and foresight function.
What does that mean around the skills in your team and what do you need in your team, to ensure that that work delivers value to the business? Because some of the skill-sets around to do those different parts of the hindsight, insight, foresight part are different.
Steve Scott: Yes. Well, even before I got to think about the skills, the first thing we looked at for our team as part of the transformation, was what is the vision for your team? What are we trying to do? What is our north star for people insight and analytics?
For us, it was all about how do we unlock value from people data? How do we drive impact at a business level and a colleague level, economically or culturally, if you like. So defining that as our vision we are wanting to move from hindsight insight into foresight. We are wanting to democratise data and insights and analytics, so we can do this at scale. That was really the starting point. We then translated that vision into a service offering. We wanted to be very, very clear with our customers, our stakeholders, our colleagues in HR, that these were the products and services that we were setting out to deliver. I think over time, service offerings for people insight and analytics teams can become diluted. People can forget what they are really there for and that can sometimes be the reason why they get pushed into reporting factories, if you like.
So we wanted to be really explicit that we were offering yes, absolutely reporting, but we wanted to offer insight. We wanted to offer analytics and we wanted to offer workforce planning and strategic workforce planning. So you have got your vision. You have got your service offering. Then it was the operating model. How could I make sure that work would flow through really efficiently and effectively from the requester through to the realisation of the benefits, if you like, of the work that we were doing. So structuring our operating model processes that were value focused, to make sure we were prioritising work that had the highest impact and didn't just stop when we produced the insight or the analytics, but stopped once we had realised the value. Once you have defined your operating model, then it came into the team structure and the roles and the capabilities. So one of the things we were able to do is automate a lot of our manually produced reporting, in order to release capacity. And then we have been able to re-appoint those roles into more we call them analysts partners, so the translator roles if you like, that are engaging with our HR colleagues to understand their requirements and then to provide consultancy around their needs. We have brought in more advanced analytics capabilities, into the team, we even bought in some change management expertise into the team, to help us build.
David Green: It can be overlooked so often.
Steve Scott: Yeah, we were very guilty of sending out a new product, a new dashboard, a new report, without consideration for how we would make sure that this is landing, that it is effective, that it is giving people what they need, and that they are able to use it effectively. So some change management effort as well. But it stemmed from being able to really be clear that we wanted to do reporting insight and analytics and then structure the team around that service offering.
David Green: Yeah and it is right. When Jonathan and I were writing the book, we saw that teams that actually took the time to set that vision at the start, was so important. Not just because it mobilises a team around a common vision, but because it sets expectations with your customers. Both inside and outside HR, it is so important.
Steve Scott: Yes. And it equally helps guide the colleagues in the team to inform the decisions that they need to make, every single day. So it is giving them the framework within which we want to operate. I didn't want to have to be there to explain to them every decision that we made, I wanted the colleagues to be empowered to take the decision that they needed to. So they just needed that framework, that vision, that clarity, of where we were headed, as a team, so that they could take then the appropriate decisions day-to-day, knowing that yes, that decision will move us closer towards our end state, towards our north star.
David Green: And that productisation element of people analytics, which we have certainly seen through our research, is increasing in the more advanced and bigger functions, such as yourselves. And it is so important to scale analytics as you said, that is why you need that change element because you can't just be throwing products out and expect people to snap them up. You need to help guide people to actually use them and it helps you improve them as well, ultimately.
Steve Scott: Yes. So, at the beginning now of a request, we talk with the stakeholder to understand what is the business problem at hand, or the business opportunity, and we work with them to estimate a return on investment of the work. What is the value of this work? What are the measures of success that we can use to track if this work is effective and delivers what we expect it to deliver? And so the work then will progress based on prioritisation around value, but it doesn't stop then when the pack has been produced and the insight shared, it stops when we have hit those measures of success. is’still early days in this and this is something we are still deploying, but we are really excited about this and the response that we have had from stakeholders is not, oh, it's not another form. Because we didn't want to make it another form, we wanted to make it a discussion a collaboration between people in insights and analytics and HR stakeholders. And they are welcoming this. They want to better understand their own business problems and appreciate the consultancy and thought we can provide, to challenge and provoke their thinking. had little to no resistance to this at all.
Again, all helping to drive this at scale because we can't work in isolation in an insights and analytics team, we have to do this in collaboration with HR and effectively foster a data-driven HR culture.
David Green: So let's talk more about creating that data-driven culture in HR, which I know is something that you are passionate about. Firstly, thank you for contributing a case insight on the work that you are doing at Standard Chartered, to our annual people analytics trends report. Can you tell us a little bit more about the connection between a data-driven culture for HR, the strength of the people analytics team, and delivering business value?
Steve Scott: Absolutely. Yeah. I think these two things are so intrinsically linked. If you have the best people analytics team in the world, but you don't have a data-driven HR function, then you are not going to deliver the value at scale that you are seeking. So, I see both of them as absolutely critical to my role and to the transformation of the team. I don't even see them as separate entities, if you like, it is one and the same thing. If we are driven by a vision to unlock value from people data, I need to address both the transformation of the team, but also the building of data confidence, data competence, in and across HR, it is only through that, that I can truly deliver the value that we are seeking to deliver through, at scale, across the group.
David Green: Yeah and that is so right. As you said, you need to be doing the two things in parallel. I speak to some of your peers and they say, well, we are building the capability in the team first and then we will start thinking about capability levels in HR, but you need to do them both together.
Steve Scott: Do them both at the same time, it is one and the same thing. As you are building new reports or you are building new insights, as you are working on use cases, that is the opportunity to do it in a way that brings in your HR colleagues. That involves them in the work, you develop that collaborative partnership and through that you are building their data confidence, their data competence, and ultimately then supporting that data-driven HR culture.
David Green: And it is something to create that sustainable capability in people analytics. Some of the organisations I have seen over the years, where they have got a great team and they have actually been doing some great work, but they haven’t paid attention to developing that culture in HR. A couple of people leave the team, the leader maybe and a couple of other people, and suddenly it all falls down. It is not sustainable. Whereas you are creating something, a legacy almost, that can continue and continue to grow as well.
Steve Scott: Yes. I think there are two aspects to it. I think first of all, our HR colleagues can be the eyes and ears for the people insight and analytics team, they are closer to the business, or the closer to the HR products that are being developed, and so they can come to us if they know what our product service offering is, they know how we can help, how we can support, and how we can add value. If they have got that data centricity, they are more likely to be able to spot the opportunities for people insight and analytics support, especially if they are value obsessed as well and they come with a real clear understanding of the value opportunity to the business problem that they are trying to solve for. So that is one aspect. It is kind of improving, if you like, the quality of use cases that an insight analytics team are asked to support because the request is more data savvy.
The other is, to do this at scale, again to deliver value at scale, you don't want the insight and analytics team to become the bottleneck. You need to have insight and analytics democratised across HR. Now that doesn't mean that it is not down to the people insight analytics team, because they can be the ones that ensure that our HR colleagues have got access to the right data, that they understand the data that we are offering, that they can leverage fully from the tools that we are supporting them with, to maximise their ability to self serve. So if you get both right, you are really then tapping into using the insight and analytics team for the highest value, most complicated advanced analytic elements, of the use cases because the business partners, the COEs, they are spotting opportunities to bring to the people and insights team. But at the same time, you have got the entire HR function working in a data-centric way helping to make evidence-based decision-making.
Put those two together, then you get the scalability.
David Green: What are some of the things you have been doing at Standard Chartered, to build a data-driven culture for HR? And what do you plan to do moving forwards?
It would be great to hear that because we get a lot of questions from people asking, well, how did you actually do that?
Steve Scott: Lots and lots of things. And there is no one thing that I would say is the silver bullet. Some things we do and they work. Some things we do and they don't land. And so it is continuously thinking about innovative things that we can do, and I will come on to them, but I think before that it is worthwhile talking about the importance of the CHRO in this, because they really do set the tone around the criticality of building a data-driven HR function.
So their words around that are really important, but not as important as their actions. So a CHRO who role models using data, who is hungry for data, leans in to shape the insights that they are looking for to have the conversations that they are having with their management team peers. That role modelling is really, really powerful in a people analytics leader. That is what you want.
I am very lucky I have got absolutely that in our CHRO at Standard Chartered. So that sets the tone, if you like, and the expectation amongst the rest of HR that then the people analytics leader can leverage from.
Some of the things though that we have done. Firstly, I have looked to put members of my leadership team into our HR management teams, respective leadership teams, if that makes sense. So they don't just turn up periodically at a leadership team meeting to present a 10 minute update on the things that we are doing in people insight and analytics. They are effectively becoming embedded parts of those HRM team members' leadership teams. They are an extension of that leadership team. So they are visible at all times and at every one of those meetings, of what we are there to do and how we might be able to support. They can chip into those conversations to say how that might be an opportunity we can help with. We have secured investment for a learning platform for HR professionals focused on insight and analytics, and of course I am talking about myHRfuture, but that is something that we have rolled out to hundreds and hundreds of HR colleagues to help them up-skill themselves. We've done things like newsletters, where we send out regular updates on the use cases that we are involved in, to raise awareness across the wider HR fraternity as to the things that we can do, that we are doing. Create some healthy competition, if you like, amongst HR to think, well, if that team are doing that, why don't we do that? I never realised that was something that we could do. Or, that might be something that can help me in my day job.
So that is really fostering a greater awareness and advocacy for what we can do as a team. I am sponsoring a cohort of colleagues that are looking at the future skills of a HR function. We have identified the top four or five key skills that we think are required for HR professionals. Data is one of those, as you would expect. So sponsoring that. Working with colleagues to shape a learning program to supplement myHRfuture. We'll hopefully, in the months and years ahead continue to build our HR confidence and competence, in using that. We have done things like create a playbook for our country heads of HR and we included a chapter solely focused on data. Again, trying to take it right down to that role, that country head of HR role, and to show them in their role, how they can use data to unlock value, many more. But just trying to be as innovative, creative, cover as many bases as we possibly can with different interventions.
David Green: And you do have a great advocate in Tanuj, your CHRO. She was on our show a couple of years ago now, she was talking about it then and with other CHROs, she is quite prominent in the market talking about how this helps the bank, helps the organisation, helps the employees, links towards employee experience and cultures, and the other initiatives that I know she is pushing forward at the bank as well. So it must be a great help.
Steve Scott: It is brilliant. It is what you dream for, as a people analytics leader, to have that level of endorsement and advocacy. But as I say, it is not just the words that Tanuj says, it is the actions. She role models it completely, every single day. Her appetite for data and insights is fantastic and the rest of HR can see that. It is tangible, it is visible to us all. And so everybody else then says, well, look, that is the expectation, that is what we have to do. And it is changing. Definitely the majority now if not all of HR from my perspective in Standard Chartered, is now absolutely aware of the importance of criticality of data. They totally get it. Some of them absolutely have the confidence and competence to be data centric. There are some, of course, they get the value, they get the importance of it, but they still need some more help and support to build out the skills. But I don't think there is anybody left in HR, in Standard Chartered, who doesn't get this at all, who still says no, data is not the future, it doesn't exist.
David Green: Most HR professionals, and we did some research at myHRfuture a couple of years ago, they actually want to learn this. Sometimes it is a confidence thing. Sometimes it is that companies aren't providing them with the tools so they can acquire these skills. And sometimes it is not in the culture. Basically all those three areas are covered in the work that you are doing now with Tanuj, with the tools that you are providing, and in the variety of different ways for people to learn.
Steve Scott: But it is equally, not just about the skill sets of the HR colleagues. That is a part of it. It is about the technology that we are using. It is about the availability of data. And that is why it is critical for analytics leaders, like myself, to really understand what are the blockers that HR professionals have in accessing the data, understanding the data, interpreting the data, and using the data effectively in their roles? It is not enough for the people analytics leader to say, it is up to them to up-skill themselves. It is not just about skills, it is about access.
So yeah, I have had lots of conversations with my peers in HR, to better understand those blockers. I can see they have got skills, many of them do, but what are we not giving them or maybe we need to give more of, in terms of availability to the data they need, in the format they need it in, at the time they need it. That is just as critical as the up-skilling element of this.
David Green: It is incumbent on us to learn what HR professionals need in their day-to-day work and then we design tools to actually support that. Really important.
So you talked a little about the role of the CHRO. In the research that you kindly contributed to, the finding was that 90% of CHROs support a data-driven culture in HR. Interestingly, the same research found that 60% of people analytics leaders felt it was their responsibility to help bring that forward. I would love to hear your views on the difference between the role of the CHRO and the people analytics leader, in developing this data-driven culture for HR. Obviously they have to work together, but I would love to see the difference.
Steve Scott: Well, I think the two coming together will absolutely help. It is back to the tone from the CHRO, the expectation setting, the role modelling, the actions not just the words, that all sets the environment, the context that then the people analytics leader can leverage from. And then again, the people analytics leader is there to help with the up-skilling but equally, it is there to ensure that the users have got access to the data they need and the tools they need. But actually I think it is broader than just the CHRO and the people analytics leader. It needs to have more depth and breadth to that. So I think, and we see this at Standard Chartered as well, the HR leadership team have got a big part to play in this and thankfully they are at Standard Chartered. So it is them leaning in, challenging me and my team to ensure that we are providing them the access to the data that they need, the tools that they need. Challenging their teams to ensure that they are engaging with my team, that they are coming to us with use cases, that they are being data centric.
It is really that triumvirate between the CHRO, the people analytics leader and their team, and then the HR leadership team. Because if you get that breadth and that depth, then again, you are firing on all cylinders.
David Green: And you are touching every part of HR.
Steve Scott: Yes. It reaches across and down into the function.
David Green: So, a couple of quick questions to finish off. I would love to hear this because we have known each other for quite a few years. What is your vision for the future of the people analytics field and data-driven HR?
Steve Scott: Well for me, it comes back to value. It is the obsession with value. My team would probably tell me to just stop talking about the value, but I can’t, that's what it has to be. And for me, I think it is about more tangible evidence of the realisation of value. That is what really excites me. I read lots and lots of articles, blogs, LinkedIn, and lots of use cases, that are talking about the potential realisation of value, but I think it comes down to the actual delivery of that value, of that impact. So I think my vision for the disciplines, is that there is increased awareness of, examples of, or evidence of, really significant impact and value, delivered to organisations, delivered to colleagues, that were driven through people insight and analytics.
David Green: Yep. Can't say it any better than that really.
One of the areas where people analytics is increasingly adding value is around the topic of employee experience and this is the question we are asking everyone on this series, so I think you might be the second person to get to this one. And the question we are asking is, what is the future of employee experience in 2022?
Steve Scott: So I think this is probably beyond just 2022, it will take us further into that. I'm sure others have said this before, but for me it is about I am thinking about, how do you translate the experience of life outside of work, into work. At home, I get Netflix recommendations and Spotify recommendations as to what I have listened to or watched that therefore informs why I would maybe be interested in looking at or listening to. I got a reminder from Moonpig the other day to tell me that it was my cousin's birthday, to make my life easier and avoid the embarrassment of missing his birthday. I wish they had done the same for my wife's anniversary. I didn't get that reminder. But all those makes my life easier, that is the whole point, and so why wouldn’t we get more of that in a work context? So whether that is recommended learning, recommended career pathways, nudges, behavioural nudges as a people leader. Just kind of a prompt, in the way I have got a Moonpig prompt, just a prompt to say you have not spoken to this colleague for a while face-to-face, why don't you set up a meeting. That can all be automated.
Even communications that we receive. My emails that I receive outside of work are all very personalised aren't they. They know exactly what I have been exploring, maybe from shopping sites, and so then it is targeted to follow up. Why couldn't that be translated into work more? I know it is starting to, but I think this will accelerate more, I think this will ramp up. And I think for this to be materialised, it is going to come down to employee experience teams, working in strong collaboration with people analytics teams and employee listening teams. Again, it is a coming together to listen to colleagues, to understand their expectations around their employee experiences then using data insight and analytics to inform the roadmap of change to work, to deliver that hyper personalisation.
David Green: Going back to what we were saying at the start around the skills data. If you have got good skills data, you can provide good recommendations for employees learning and career paths and everything else. So, yes, fascinating. And certainly something we are seeing, employee experience, employee listening in particular, and people analytics coming together very closely. Sorry to talk about COVID again, the last two years that is lots of employee listening, understanding how employees are feeling, and then actually communicating that to leaders so they can make decisions which are employee centric and value adding. That is a nice point to finish. Steve, thanks so much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. The first one we have recorded in person for a couple of years, so it makes it extra special. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media? If you do social media, you did mention LinkedIn.
Steve Scott: Definitely you can find me absolutely on LinkedIn. Hopefully the conference circuit will open back up again face-to-face, I have been speaking or attending lots of virtual’s but I am chomping at the bit for them to become real again in the future. So if you see me at one of those, come and say hello.
David Green: Great, Steve. Thanks very much for being on the show, it’s a pleasure.