I feel very passionate about upskilling HR, in analytics or in data literacy.
And I think that often is or can be the barrier to a successful people analytics team, because
you may produce the best analytics, you may have the most advanced set of data and analysis done.
But if you're HRBPs, or the larger, richer population cannot translate that to the business
that they're supporting. It kind of loses the purpose.
*MUSIC*
Madhura, thanks so much for being here.
Sure. Thank you.
You're one of the few people who has a very long experience when it comes to what is now
called People Analytics. I think you have about 10 years of people analytics, can you share
something about how you've seen the field change in the past 10 years?
I think the field has undergone a tremendous amount of change.
And a couple of things that I've seen that have really changed in this field is, I would
say, the role of technology. Back in the day or you know, even 10 years back nine years
back, most of the analysis that we ran, were, you know, simple SPSS, and we were trained
in running SPSS analysis, and all the statistics were done using that.
But as I see, the analytics are now more and more being built into the tools that are being
offered by the vendors. Be it, you know, in our network analysis, or even simple regressions
for running a key driver analysis of engagement.
It's part of the tool, it's part of the offering from the vendors.
The second trend, or the second change, I would say or call out is, who is people analytics for?
Right? So when the field started emerging, it was more about, you know, HR for HR, so let's measure
the impact of training or any of the other HR programs. Those haven't gone away.
But, you know, then we gradually moved into people analytics should help the business deliver, right?
So what are the predictors of sales performance?
So we should, ultimately our goal is to help the business deliver its goals.
But I see the field moving to, and it has already started going in that direction is,
how can we make a difference in the life of the employee?
What does it mean for the employee at the end of the day?
So yes, businesses important?
Yes, HR is important.
But what does it mean for the employee?
Can I help the employee perform better or feel better about the job?
And that's what people analytics is gradually moving towards.
So at an individual level, how can we help the employee?
So that has been another change. One last change, I think,
just the different data sources that are currently being worked upon, so to say.
The field started with just simple demographic data, and then engagement
data, which were traditional HR data sources. But now we are talking about email metadata,
we are talking about, you know, connections or collaboration data over these collaboration platforms.
So taking all those different sources of data, the non-traditional data sources, I think,
is one of the key changes I've seen in the last 10 years.
Very interesting!
What at this current moment, do you see as the main constraint in the adoption of people
analytics within large organizations?
I wouldn't, I wouldn't say there's, you know, single biggest constraint, it really depends
on where the organization is in its journey.
But I feel very passionate about upskilling HR in analytics or in data literacy.
And I think that often is or can be the barrier to a successful people analytics team. Because
you may produce the best analytics, you may have the most advanced set of data and analysis done,
but if your HRBPs or the larger HR population cannot translate that to the business that
they're supporting, it kind of loses the purpose.
And it works the other way as well.
So if businesses ask certain questions, if the HRBPs or the large HR population cannot
have questions to ask them back saying: "Is this a representative sample?"
or "Have we seen other data sources that validate what you're saying?" - we also don't serve the purpose
Looking forward...
So we've looked back, we've looked at the present; looking forward: what excites you
the most in the next 12 to 18 months about the field of people analytics?
I think I'm personally very excited with the journey that we are on at Syngenta where we
are at that stage where we have brought the data together.
It's still a work in progress.
But we have the team in place.
But now we are trying to carve out that space where we know these are things that we are
going to be working on.
And we recently did a crowdsourcing exercise to understand how people would want their
performance management and development experience to be at Syngenta.
So the people analytics team played a big role in analysing that data and feeding it
back to the leadership team.
I think going forward we're also looking at certain business questions that have come
to us saying, you know, "If you want to build the headquarters for this particular function,
what should the team look like? How many people should be collocated?". And that is a perfect
scenario for an Organization Network Analysis. And even though we are still in an ideating
stage, that's probably something we're gonna tackle next. And bringing HR along with
us in that journey is something that we have to do and we are doing that, so that's
that's part of the excitement as well
Well, you're evangelizing analytics and data literacy.
Absolutely! That's kind of one of the top 3 agenda items in our roadmap!
Fantastic!
Thank you very much.