*How Workday Created an Impactful People Analytics Function*
By Blaise RadleyStaff Writer, Workday
Now, as we move into a new world of work, many employees are reevaluating 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, Workday Vice President of People Analytics Phil Willburn and Insight222 and myHRfuture.com Director David Green discussed how businesses can use people analytics to make the right decisions to ensure their future success.
Historically, HR has been perceived as lacking data literacy. Now, the best HR organizations are working with both people data and 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, 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 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. Enabling managers to take action in the same place where they view employee data promotes higher engagement rates and more positive results.
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 each 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, which 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.
Structuring data differently depending on the persona that’s being catered to helps improve engagement dramatically. For example, at Workday, senior-level employees receive a monthly digest that details the major shifts in the organization, from turnover to diversity. From there they have the option to dive deeper into the analytics using their Workday dashboard, which provides further recommended actions and the option to contact an HR partner directly. In that way, we ensure that the insights always speak to them specifically.
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 democratizing 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 of its employees. Through those dashboards, employees can see how their engagement scores compare across teams, companies, and industry benchmarks to drive stronger, more informed conversations. Similarly, our diversity quarterly snapshot allows employees to see diversity trends and insights, and track the progress of diversity initiatives, quarter over quarter.
By democratizing data, not only do you increase trust, but you also promote buy-in.
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 with natural language processing technology, identifying issues as they arise and measuring the outcomes, and providing self-service data options. While fancy visualizations can be a compelling way to view data, first and foremost it’s critical that your data insights remain actionable.
Find your organization’s energy. New hybrid models of working require businesses to identify sources of collaborative energy. Rather than having a fixed strategy in place, organizations 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.
You can find the full transcript of the podcast with David Green and Phil Willburn at Insight222.
