- Hello everyone, I'm here with Amit Mohindra.
Amit, very glad to have you.
- My pleasure, so happy to be here.
- We're here at Unleash and you just gave a workshop
called People Analytics Nirvana.
What was the workshop about?
- Yeah, so until a few years ago you wouldn't use
people and analytics together in a sentence,
let alone nirvana.
- Yeah.
- So, you know, the conference had so many sessions
on analytics and some of the technical aspects.
I thought it might be refreshing to take a bit
of a different attack and think about analytics
from a more reflective standpoint.
- Yeah.
- And I feel I can do it because I've been
doing people analytics for quite a while
and I decided to talk about this very esoteric
notion of nirvana as a destination.
So I help people at the event sort of sit back and reflect,
because we often don't have time to reflect.
We are so busy, even at the conference
going from session to session,
and at work we're busy going from project to project,
and it's only when you reflect
and you think about what's happened,
that you can learn and improve.
And not just what's happened in the past,
but what's going to happen.
That's called reflecting on the future,
and that's what this conference is about,
the future of work,
and what's the role of analytics,
what's the role of technology.
So I sort of had a bit of fun with it.
It was a bit of a risk, I wasn't sure
if people would really come to this.
- But I think it played out well,
because I heard that the room was packed.
'Cause you've been, for the viewers that don't know,
you have been doing people analytics
for quite a while already.
Can you explain something about your background?
- Yeah, yeah, so, you know, originally
I'm an electrical engineer,
and I went to graduate school to study labor economics,
because I always felt, growing up in India,
that the solution to many of our problems
was not necessarily more capital but,
what do you do with so many people.
Very real sort of situation.
So I became a labor economist.
I didn't really anticipate ending up in HR,
I didn't really know what HR was.
So I became a research economist,
but studying labor markets.
And somehow then I got into the private sector,
and into consulting,
and did compensation and benefits for a long time.
And then my first really formal people analytics job
was as the head of workforce intelligence
at McKesson, a big healthcare company.
And then Apple.
But I started out the first time in 1999,
I created a group called HR Strategy and Analysis
at Lehman Brothers.
So 19 years ago.
And at that point, it was just me,
and I convinced my boss, let's start this group,
because there was so much work to do,
and single-handedly I did predicting a vision,
predicting success, how we look at qualitative
and quantitative information.
We did some rudimentary text analytics.
You know, what companies did for the next 10, 15 years
was already sort of done.
And if you think about it,
now there's artificial intelligence and machine learning,
but a lot of the mathematics haven't changed.
Survival analysis, it's the same from 20, 30 years ago,
logistic regression.
Even some machine learning techniques.
They were just called nonparametric econometrics,
but now it's artificial intelligence.
- So you've worked at Apple,
but recently you've made a change.
Tell us more about that.
- So I was really fortunate to work at Apple
for a few years.
I was hired to set up the people analytics team,
which I did, and built it from just a handful of people
to a bigger team.
And it was time for me to move on,
and I decided that I'd like to go back
and work for myself again,
and I've launched a company called People Analytics Success,
and it's got three pillars so far.
One is advisory, so helping companies
get started in analytics,
or do specific projects.
It's helping HR tech startups that are applying
machine learning for example to people situations,
and how do you hone that as a product.
The second pillar is exec coaching.
So how do you help HR leaders who aren't comfortable
with analytics, get more comfortable,
because now it's pervasive,
and you really have to be comfortable.
Also helping people analytics leaders
show up as HR leaders,
so they can have a seat at the HR table.
Otherwise they're just tools and they can be ignored.
But if they're actually making,
they're in there and making decisions, it's helpful.
I've also found it helpful for the analytics leader
to also have some sort of other responsibility,
whether it's compensation, or ability or operations,
to have some sort of stake in the function of HR.
And then finally, education.
So that's one big need,
and I know you understand that as well,
'cause you're in that business too.
- We've been dabbling in it, yeah.
- Yeah, it's very impressive, and it's so important
to help HR business partners and others,
again, just get more confident,
get more comfortable.
Hopefully some of them will get so interested
that they want to learn the mathematics,
and the econometrics.
But you don't have to do that for everyone.
It's really, ultimately, what's really important,
is how can you make the best use
of the existing people analytics team,
as a business HR person,
and again show up as a more strategic
and business-oriented HR person.
- Yeah, and the education of course is very important to,
in the end, shift the culture and
to actually implement the change,
and I think that that also goes back
to why the analytics leader needs to be involved
with the top HR team.
They need to make that impact, and their voice
needs to be heard in order to be truly effective.
- You know, the talk I gave on People Analytics Nirvana,
I was talking about the newness of analytics,
and what happens in the future.
Maybe it's not even a thing.
Maybe it's just pervasive and we don't need
an analytics team.
And there is a way of thinking about it,
using, I think it's a Buddhist approach.
So, think about it.
There is no mountain.
There is a mountain.
There is.
Right, so just think about that.
There is no people analytics.
There is people analytics.
There is.
And it's just pervasive, it's part of how we do business.
That's the importance of the education piece,
so that everyone is equipped.
And it may take a while.
- Probably, yeah.
So, do you see then, analytics, you see analytics
as an integral part of doing business?
Does people analytics still exist as a separate unit,
or will it just be analytics,
will people analytics in the end disappear?
- Yeah, so that's a topic of debate,
and I think there's a risk, I consider it a risk,
that the people analytics is consumed,
or subsumed within the broader analytics team.
But there's some advantages for that.
I think you'd probably get more resources,
and you'd have different ideas,
and so I think you could get some creativity
and innovation through that.
But I think people analytics is different
because you're dealing with people.
You need to have some sort of understanding of how HR works.
You have to have a stake in people and their success.
And many people who get into HR have that.
And if it's just about the numbers,
then you're not doing that justice to the function.
- So the passion for people, even if it's through data,
it's still important to...
- Because I think you can just use numbers
and make decisions that are not right.
They don't make sense.
You still need the human interpretation.
So the advocacy of somebody who's within the HR function,
for people, to have that interpretation.
- Any closing thoughts before we wrap this up, Amit?
- You know, this is an amazing event,
and there's so much going on.
Very frenetic.
There's a lot of talk about the future, and about AI,
and I see people getting caught up in that.
So what I would recommend is just, again, reflect.
Sit back, think about things,
don't necessarily jump to action quickly.
But at the end of the day, action is what's required
for people analytics.
And we've come a long way from having no data
to some, and some useful data.
We've come a long way going from having data to insights.
But the missing step, the last mile, if you will,
is from insights to action.
That's where, again, I think if the people analytics leader
has a stake in the function or is part
of the leadership team, then you can have more influence
in actually making it happen.
- Perfect.
Amit, thank you very much.
- Thanks, Erik.