Data as a game changer People analytics
Is wearable technology the future for employees? The results were
pretty shocking - it turned out that some names consistently
represent different cultural backgrounds. “The results were pretty shocking - it turned out that some names consistently received a lower response rate from faculty members,” says Donchak. “The implications are pretty clear and pretty profound.”
received a lower response rate from faculty members
She argues that a data- oriented approach levels the playing field by flagging candidates who might be a
good fit, but who may also get
lost in the shuffle. “For example, many individuals will get started down the recruiting process with a particular organisation based on an introduction from a friend or a relative - they start out with a strong network. By relying more on data to identify promising candidates, you can give those individuals without the network advantage a fair start.”
Donchak says that an increasing number of companies are sharing their learnings in people analytics broadly, encouraging other organisations to leverage them to improve their own HR functions, and that employers “everywhere” should start by taking a look at some of the work that’s already been done in the field of people analytics. Waber adds that while people analytics has taken off in the US, organisations such as Tao Leadership in the UK are bringing the approach to companies in Europe and beyond. “In around 10 years everyone will have to do it, so it’s the organisations that invest in this capability today that will win.”
But Donchak adds a cautionary note: technology is not a silver bullet. “It’s important to emphasize that people analytics will help augment a human decision-making process. We aren’t at the point where the data can tell us with 100% accuracy whether or not a person would be a good fit, culturally, in a particular organisation, and we may never be. But we are making some great strides in using data to help make these very important decisions.” n
Measuring and managing soft skills such as communication, collaboration and engagement in organisations can be challenging, and meaningful data is often lacking. US company, Humanyze is tackling this problem by using technology that combines wearable sensors and digital data to deliver people analytics and insights to companies. The sensors analyse how people communicate in real time, enabling companies to determine the characteristics that make up successful teams and companies, describing those characteristics mathematically.
The badges are wearable devices that measure wearers’ human interaction, conversational time, physical proximity to other people, and physical activity levels using social signals derived from vocal features, body motion and relative location. Worn by a team, or by the entire organisation, the badges record anonymised ‘big data’ - hundreds of data points per minute - which is analysed though proprietary algorithms.
Ben Waber, President and Chief Executive Officer of Humanyze, says, “The most important thing that happens at work is face-to-face communication. Whether with co-workers or customers, interaction is the glue that binds people together. We realised that you need sensors in the physical world to measure that interaction. The company ID badge is a sensor that people already carry, so when we created the Sociometric Badge we basically added a number of additional sensors to the traditional ID. Concretely, these badges have microphones, an accelerometer, and proximity detection using Bluetooth and infra-red.”
Humanyze and its partners deploy these badges on an opt-in basis. The badges don’t record what people say and individual data isn’t given
to companies. “Individuals own their own data and get to see how they stack up against, say, the top 10% performers,” says Waber. “The company gets to see what actually happens across the company and how that relates to outcomes they care about, such as productivity and retention.”
Bank of America has used Humanyze’s technology in its contact centres to look at what behaviours predicted retention. By combining data analytics with KPIs from the Bank, Humanyze was able to show that people with very cohesive co-worker groups (the people who talk a lot to each other) completed calls in half the time compared to people with the least cohesive networks, and were much less stressed. 80% of this interaction happened when employees’ lunch breaks overlapped. Bank of America then changed break times for half of their staff, giving them breaks at the same time. Three months later, calls were completed over 20% more quickly and turnover went down from approximately 40% a year to 12% a year.
“In the UK, companies such as Tao Leadership (www.taoleadership.
co.uk) are bringing our technology to their clients to identify behavioural signatures of the most effective employees and using this to help hire and train the best people,” says Waber. “Essentially, you can look at aggregate statistics on conversational and movement patterns and use it to design interviews and scenarios that elicit these behaviours. If you observe these same effective behaviours in graduate talent, then you know you’ve got a match.”
www.humanyze.com
10 Graduate Recruiter |
www.agr.org.uk
¹ What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organisations (2012)
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