“We have charts and graphs to back us up. So f***
off.” New hires in Google’s people analytics department began receiving a
laptop sticker with that slogan a few years ago, when the group probably felt
it needed to defend its work. Back then people analytics—using statistical
insights from employee data to make talent management decisions—was still a
provocative idea with plenty of skeptics who feared it might lead companies to
reduce individuals to numbers. HR collected data on workers, but the notion
that it could be actively mined to understand and manage them was novel—and
suspect.
Today there’s no need for stickers. More than 70%
of companies now say they consider people analytics to be a
high priority. The field even has celebrated case studies, like Google’s Project
Oxygen, which uncovered the practices of the tech giant’s best managers and
then used them in coaching sessions to improve the work of low performers.
Other examples, such as Dell’s experiments with increasing the success of its
sales force, also point to the power of people analytics.
But hype, as it often does, has outpaced
reality. The truth is, people analytics has made only modest progress over the
past decade. A
survey by Tata Consultancy Services found that just 5% of big-data
investments go to HR, the group that typically manages people analytics. And a recent study by Deloitte showed that although people
analytics has become mainstream, only 9% of companies believe they have a good
understanding of which talent dimensions drive performance in their
organizations.
Source: HBR Nov-Dec,2018
