*How Workday created an impactful people analytics function*
By Blaise Radley, EMEA Staff Writer
In a recent podcast, Phil Wilburn, VP People Analytics at Workday, and David Green, Director at Insight222 and myHRfuture.com, looked at how people analytics is evolving in a time of monumental change for the HR industry.
Employees have faced a significant amount of upheaval over the last five years. Now, as we move into a new world of work, many employees are re-evaluating their workplace priorities. For businesses to ensure they promote a positive employee experience and strong employee retention, a robust and impactful people analytics function is critical.
Two years from now, companies will be facing an entirely different world of work – but employees will remember the decisions that are made today. As part of a recent podcast, Phil Wilburn, Vice President, People Analytics at Workday, and David Green, Director at Insight222 and myHRfuture.com, discussed how businesses can use people analytics to make the right decisions to ensure their future success.
How people analytics is evolving
Historically, HR has been perceived as lacking data literacy. Now, the best HR organisations are blending people data with business data, using AI to map skills and leading data initiatives. But companies still aren't getting the full value out of people analytics teams. That's largely due to taking on non-scalable projects and low adoption rates with analytics products.
To create scalable people analytics, businesses need to ensure solutions are adopted and used effectively across functions. Then, they need to embed the insights generated into everyday business processes. At Workday, we have a people leader dashboard that every manager uses when working with their teams. By enabling managers to take action in the same place that they view employee data, you promote higher engagement rates and more positive results.
How people analytics is structured at Workday
At Workday, the mission of the people analytics team is to help Workday leaders make better people decisions. Working with a moderate-sized team – around 15 people in total – it’s not possible to interact with every single leader, so our people analytics professionals have to create scalable solutions. There are two major factors that have allowed our team to work at scale:
We have a persona-based analytics strategy, so we align every one of our products to a persona and then drive adoption to make sure that each product is serving that persona.
We create and focus on in-depth enablement practices. They include creating an in-depth guide for HR business partners on using dashboards to generate insights and supplying senior business leaders with high-level overview videos.
Historically, HR has been perceived as lacking data literacy. Now, the best HR organisations are blending people data with business data, using AI to map skills and leading data initiatives.
While manager dashboards are a critical part of a people analytics strategy, it’s equally important that your employees have visibility into their people data too. By democratising data, not only do you increase trust, but you also promote buy-in.
By structuring data differently depending on the persona that’s being catered to, engagement improves dramatically. For example, at Workday senior employees receive a monthly digest that details the major shifts in the organisation, from turnover to diversity. From there they have the option to dive deeper into the analytics using their dashboard, which further provides recommended actions and the option to contact an HR partner directly. In that way, we ensure that the insights always speak to them specifically.
How Workday democratises people data
While manager dashboards are a critical part of a people analytics strategy, it’s equally important that your employees have visibility into their people data too. By democratising data, not only do you increase trust, but you also promote buy-in. Since employees can see their data and how it relates to company actions, businesses can create a sense of community that’s built on transparency.
Workday Peakon Employee Voice, our continuous listening platform, contains dashboards for all employees. Through those dashboards, employees can see how their engagement scores compare across teams, companies and industry benchmarks, driving stronger, more informed conversations. Similarly, the VIBE™ index, one of our diversity and inclusion solutions, enables employees to run a diversity report and see the progress of diversity initiatives, quarter over quarter.
Three tips for a successful people analytics function
Creating a successful people analytics function requires a dedicated team, a strong understanding of the business and a robust long-term plan. Here are three tips to ensure that your people analytics team is focusing on the right priorities:
Learn the business. It's hard to know where your people analytics professionals can best provide value without knowing the business. Do you know the drivers for your business? Do you know how you carry out your planning cycle? Do you know about your customers? That’s how businesses can make their insights applicable and scalable.
Focus on the fundamentals. Without the fundamentals in place you can’t create options that scale. That means listening to your employees, identifying issues as they arise, measuring the outcomes and providing self-service data options. While fancy visualisations can be a compelling way to view data, first and foremost it’s critical that your data insights remain actionable.
Find your organisation’s energy. New hybrid models of working require businesses to identify sources of collaborative energy. Rather than having a fixed strategy in place, organisations should be prepared to listen to their employees, identify areas of the business that are flourishing and use that information to inform how they promote a positive company culture.
