10 Trends in Workforce Analytics （英文）
Workforce analytics is developing and maturing. These are the 10 major trends for the near future.
1. From one time to real-time
Many workforce analytics efforts start as a consultancy project. A question is formulated (“How do our employees experience their journey?”), many people are interviewed, data is gathered, and with the help of the external consultants a nice report is written and many follow up projects to redesign the employee journey are defined.
A one-time effort is nice, but it might be more beneficial to develop ways to gather more regularly and maybe even real-time feedback from candidates, employees and other relevant groups.
The survey practice is changing. We see organizations using several approaches:
The classic annual or bi-annual employee survey, for a deep dive.
Weekly, monthly or quarterly pulse surveys to gather more frequent feedback. A few questions, often varying the questions per cycle. Some more advanced pulse survey solutions are adaptive: they ask more questions to people when they sense there are issues (“How was your week?”. If the answer is “Very Good”, the survey is finished, if you answer, “Not so good”, there are some follow-up questions). Pulse surveys can also be easily connected to the important “moments that matter” for the employee experience.
Continuous real-time mood measurement. Innovative solutions in this area are still scarce, especially if you want to measure in a passive non-obtrusive way. Keencorp is an example, they analyze aggregated e-mails and can report on the mood (and risks) in different parts of an organization.
In my article Employee mood measurement trends, you can find an extensive overview of mood measurement providers.
2. From people analytics to workforce analytics
Currently, the general opinion seems to be that people analytics is a better label than HR analytics.
Increasingly the workforce is consisting of more than just people. Robots and chatbots are entering the workforce. The first legal discussions have started: who is responsible for the acts of the robots?
If we’re also analyzing robots, we’re moving from people analytics towards workforce analytics. Robot wellbeing and robot productivity is a nice domain for HR to claim.
3. More transparency
This overview of workforce analytics trends cannot be complete without a reference to GDPR. GDPR is fueling a lot of positive developments, one of them being a lot more transparency. About what kind of data is collected, how it is used, and how algorithms are used to make decisions about people.
The issue of data ownership is related. It is expected that employees will no longer accept that they cannot own their own personal data. Employees need to have the possibility to show their data to their potential next employer as evidence for their productivity and engagement.
4. More focus on productivity
In the last years, there has not been a lot of focus on productivity. We see a slow change at the horizon.
Traditionally, capacity problems have been solved by recruiting new people. This has led to several problems. I have seen this several times in fast growing scale-ups.
As the growth is limited by the ability the find new people, the selection criteria are (often unconsciously) lowered, as many people are needed fast. These new people are not as productive as the existing crew. Because you have more people, you need more managers. Lower quality people and more managers lowers productivity.
Another approach is, to focus more on increasing the productivity of the existing employees, instead of hiring additional staff, and on improving the selection criteria.
Using workforce analytics, you can try to find the characteristics of top performing people and teams, and the conditions that facilitate top performance.
These findings can be used to increase productivity and to select candidates that have the characteristics of top performers. When productivity increases, you need less people to deliver the same results.
A related read on this topic are the 3 reasons to stop counting heads.
5. What is in it for me?
A lack of trust can influence many workforce analytics efforts. If the focus is primarily on efficiency and control, employees will doubt if there are any benefits for them.
Overall there is a shift to more employee-centric organizations, although sometimes you can doubt how genuine the efforts are to improve the employee experience.
Asking the question: “How will the employees benefit from this effort?” is a good starting point for most workforce analytics projects. It also helps to create buy-in, which becomes increasingly important with the introduction of the GPDR.
6. From individuals to teams to networks
Many workforce analytics projects today are still focused on individuals. What are the characteristics of our top performers? How can we measure the individual employee experience? How can we decrease absenteeism?
Earlier, I gave an overview to what extend current HR practices are focused on teams.
As you can see in the table, most of the practices are still very focused on the individual. Workforce analytics can help to improve the way teams and networks function in and across organizations. The rise of Organizational Network Analysis is one of the promising signs.
7. Cracks in the top-down approach
The tendency to implement changes top-down, is still common.
We like uniformity and standardization. In our central control room, we look at our dashboard, and we know we need to act when the lights are turning from green to orange.
HR finds it difficult to approach issues in a different way. Performance management is a good example. Changing the performance management process is often tackled as an organization-wide issue, and HR needs to find the new uniform solution.
In line with the trend called “the consumerization of HR”, employees are expected to take more initiative. Employees are increasingly tired of waiting for the organization and HR, and want to be more independent of organizational initiatives.
If you want feedback, you can easily organize it yourself, for example with the Slack plug-in Captain Feedback. A simple survey to measure the mood in your team is quickly built with Polly (view: “How to measure the mood in your team with Slack and Polly“). Many employees are already tracking their own fitness with trackers like Fitbit and the Apple Watch.
Many teams primarily use communication tools as WhatsApp and Slack, avoiding the officially approved communication channels. HR might go with the flow, and tap on to the channels used, instead of trying to promote standardized and approved channels.
How can workforce analytics benefit from the data gathered by on their employee’s own devices? If it is clear, what the benefits are for employees to share their data, they might be able to help to enrich the data sets and improve the quality of workforce analytics.
8. Ignoring the learning curve
In their book “Making HR measurement strategic”, Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau presented an often-quoted picture, with the title “Hitting the “Wall” in HR measurement”. The wall was the wall between descriptive and predictive analytics.
There are many more overviews with the people analytics maturity levels. Generally, the highest level is predictive analytics.
Patrick Coolen of ABN AMRO Bank recently mentioned a next level: continuous analytics, and he introduced a second wall, the wall between predictive analytics and continuous analytics.
As predictive analytics seems to be the holy grail, many HR teams want to jump immediately to this level. Let’s skip operational reporting, advanced reporting and strategic analytics. We can leapfrog, ignore the learning curve, and jump to the highest level in one step.
For many teams, ignoring the learning curve does not seem to be a sensible strategy. Maybe it is better to learn walking before you start running.
9. Give us back our time!
Recently I spoke to HR professionals from big multinationals who were involved in a “Give us back our time” projects.
In their organizations, the assignment to all staff groups was: stop using (meant was: wasting) more and more time of the employees and managers, please give us some time back!
An example that was mentioned concerned performance management. In this organization, they calculated that all the work around the performance management process for one employee costed manager and employee around 10 hours (preparation, two formal meetings per year, completing the online forms, meeting with HR to review the results etc.).
By simplifying the process (no mandatory meetings, no forms, no review meetings, just one annual rating to be submitted per employee by the manager), HR could give back many hours to the organization – to the relief of both managers and employees.
Big HR systems generally promise a lot. But before the system can live up to the high expectations, a lot of work needs to be done. Data fields must be defined. Global processes must be standardized. Heritage systems must be dismantled.
This results in a lot of work (and agony), for employees, for managers, for HR and for the implementation partners (who do not mind).
Workforce analytics can help a lot in the “give-us-time-back” projects, for example by some simple time-measurement. Measure the time a sample of managers, employees, and HR professionals spend on different activities, and estimate the value these activities optimizes the core activities of the organization (e.g. serving clients and bringing in new clients).
10. Too high expectations
The expectations of workforce analytics are often too high. Two elements must be considered.
In the first place, human behavior is not so easy to predict, even if you have access to loads of people data.
Even in domains where good performance is very well defined and where a lot of data is gathered inside and outside the field, as for example in football, it is very difficult to predict the future success of young players.
Secondly, the question is to what extend managers, employees and HR professionals behave in a rational way. All humans are prone to cognitive biases, that influence the way they interpret the outcomes of workforce analytics projects. Some interesting articles on this subject are why psychological knowledge is essential to success with people analytics, by Morten Kamp Andersen, and The psychology of people analytics, written by myself.
A more general thought: what if you replaced ‘Workforce analytics’ with ‘Science’? What is the role of science in HR? The puzzle is, that there are many scientific findings that have been available for a long time but that are hardly used in organizations.
Example: it has been proven repeatedly, that the (unstructured) interview is a very poor selection instrument.
But still, most organizations still rely heavily on this instrument (as people tend to overestimate their own capabilities). Why would organizations rely on the outcomes of workforce analytics, when they hardly use scientific findings in the people domain?
An interesting presentation on this topic that I recommend is by Rob Briner, titled evidence-based HR, what is it and is it really happening?
There’s a lot that’s changing in the world of work. These are the 10 trends in workforce analytics that I’m seeing today and that will likely impact the way we work in the near future.
This article is based on a keynote I gave at the Workforce Analytics Forum in Frankfurt, Germany, on April 18, 2018.
by Tom Haak
Tom Haak is the director of the HR Trend Institute The HR (Human Resources) Trend Institute follows, detects and encourages trends. In the people and organization domain and in related areas. Where possible, the institute is also a trend setter. Tom has an extensive experience in HR Management in multinational companies. He worked in senior HR positions at Fugro, Arcadis, Aon, KPMG and Philips Electronics. He holds a master’s degree in Psychology. Tom has a keen interest in innovative HR, HR tech and how organizations can benefit from trend shifts. Twitter: @tomwhaak
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2018年06月27日
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不一样的角度来看待科技的发展：I was wrong. Too much tech is ruining lives作者：Vivek Wadhwa
Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University College of Enginee
Just four years ago I was a cheerleader. Social media was supposed to be the great hope for democracy. I know because I told the world so. I said in 2014 that no-one could predict where this revolution would take us. My conclusion was dusted with optimism: a better connected human race would find a way to better itself.
I was only half right: nobody could indeed have predicted where we have ended up. Yet my optimistic prognosis was utterly misguided. Social media has led to less human interaction, not more. It has suppressed human development, not stimulated it. As Big Tech has marched onward, we have regressed.
Look at the evidence. Research shows that social media may well be making many of us unhappy, jealous and – paradoxically – antisocial. Even Facebook gets it. An academic study that Facebook cited in its corporate blog post revealed that when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information they wind up feeling worse. Just ten minutes on Facebook is enough to depress – clicking and liking a multitude of posts and links seems to have a negative effect on mental health.
Meantime, the green-eyed monster thrives on the social network: reading rosy stories and/or carefully controlled images about the social- and love-lives of others leads to poor comparisons with one’s own existence. Getting out in the warts-and-all real world and having proper conversations would provide a powerful antidote. Some chance! Humans have convinced themselves that ‘catching up’ online is a viable alternative to in-person socializing.
And what of consumer choice? Don’t book your next city break via Google. Research shows that a typical search for a family vacation begins with “the best hotels in…” or the “top ten hotels in…”. Yet these searches return paid-for links from big identikit hotel companies and well-funded broker websites. Local bloggers, like the guy in Jaipur or the girl in Paris who make it their job to suggest the most interesting stays, don’t appear until search page ten (AKA nowhere). Discovering real places, recommended by locals and run by real people, got a lot harder in the internet age. Guidebooks used to do the job, but few buy them anymore.
We are becoming unthinkingly reliant – addicted – to ease-of-use at the expense of quality. We are walking dumpsters for internet content that we don’t need and which might actively damage our brains.
The technology industry also uses another technique to keep us hooked: feeding us a bottomless pit of information.
This phenomenon’ is the effect Netflix has when it auto-plays the next episode of a show after a cliffhanger and you continue watching, thinking, “I can make up the sleep over the weekend.” The cliffhanger is, of course, always replaced by another cliffhanger. The 13-part season is followed by another one, and yet another. We spend longer in front of the television yet we feel no more satiated. When Facebook, Instagram and Twitter tack on their scrolling pages and update their news feeds, causing each article to roll into the next, the effect manifests itself again.
Perhaps we should go back to our smartphones and, instead of playing Netflix or sending texts on WhatsApp, use their core function. Call up our friends and family and have a chat or – better – arrange to meet them.
Meanwhile, Big Tech could carve an opportunity from a crisis. What about offering a subscription to an ad-free Google? In return for a monthly fee, searches would be based on quality of content rather than product placement. I would pay for that. The time-savings alone when booking a trip would be worth it.
Apple pioneered the Do Not Disturb function which stopped messages and calls waking us from sleep, unless a set of emergency-criteria were met by the caller. How about a Focus Mode that turned off all notifications and hid our apps from our home screen, to ease the temptation to play with our phones when we should be concentrating on our work, or talking to our spouses, friends and colleagues?
In the 1980s, the BBC in Britain ran a successful children’s series called Why Don’t You? that implored viewers to “turn off their TV set and go out and do something less boring instead”, suggesting sociable activities that did not involve a screen. It was wise before its time. The TV seems like a puny adversary compared to the deadening digital army we face today.
This is based on my forthcoming book, Your Happiness Was Hacked, which will show you how you can take control and live a more balanced technology life.
You can pre-order the book, coauthored with Alex Salkever: https://www.amazon.com/Your-Happiness-Was-Hacked-Brain/dp/1523095849
An Email From Elon Musk Reveals Why Managers Are Always a Bad idea
By Chuck Blakeman Founder, Crankset Group @ChuckBlakeman
Survey.com's annual "Wasting Time at Work" report revealed that if you eliminate managers completely, you remove 75 percent of the reasons someone will leave your company. There is a simple reason for that. They're in the way, literally. Elon Musk knows that, and isn't alone.
Before Elon Musk, There Was Gore
Bill Gore, co-inventor of Gore-Tex and founder of the $3.3 billion company W. L. Gore, understood the idea implicitly and built his entire company around self-managed teams and the absence of managers of any kind. In 1976, he published a simple paper called "The Lattice Organization" that described how a company of any size (Gore has 10,200 staff) could run much better without managers. He expressed the simplicity of an organization designed around the Lattice concept in the following illustration.
The message: collaborate with whomever you need to, whenever you need to, without ever going through a manager to get to anyone.
This brilliantly simple illustration of an organization built around efficient and effective communications makes it very clear that if you need something from someone else in the organization, you go to that person. If your team needs something from another team, you go to that team. In the Lattice Organization, there are no managers, or inboxes and outboxes at multiple levels, or politics and departmental fiefdoms to wade through. Today, there are nearly a hundred very large companies like W. L. Gore that operate this way and thousands of smaller ones.
An Enduring Truth
The Lattice Organization continues to spread. An internal email, revealed only recently, from Elon Musk to all Tesla staff shows that Musk intuitively understands that managers add no value in pushing great ideas forward, but instead are more likely to slow down innovation, communications, and production. It's the Lattice concept clearly articulated once again, 40 years later by a business leader of the next generation:
From: Elon Musk
To: All Tesla Staff
Subject: Communication Within Tesla
There are two schools of thought about how information should flow. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it enhances the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.
To solve a problem quickly, two people in different depts should simply talk and make the right thing happen. Instead, people are forced to talk to their manager, who talks to their manager, who talks to the manager in the other dept, who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding.
Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company.
You can talk to your manager's manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else's permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is to ensure that we execute ultra-fast and well. We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.
One final point is that managers should work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company that create an "us vs. them" mentality, or impede communication in any way. This is unfortunately a natural tendency and needs to be actively fought. How can it possibly help Tesla for depts to erect barriers between themselves, or see their success as relative within the company instead of collective?
We are all in the same boat. Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your dept.
Thanks, Elon
W. L. Gore never had to send such an email, and if Musk is serious about keeping managers from being obstructionists, he would do well to eliminate them altogether as Gore and many other companies have done. But clearly Musk gets that they don't naturally add value to the communications and innovations chains. To the contrary, their natural obstructionism must be mitigated against as a firing offense.
Loyalty to the Hierarchy
Is your company addicted to serving hierarchies or getting things done? Musk warned that managers will get fired for even allowing communications to go through them. In almost all companies, people get fired for going directly to the source of an answer instead of paying homage and worshiping at the feet of the hierarchy. In companies with managers, Dilbert reigns, and the only solution is an email from the top of the pyramid demanding that managers stay out of the way.
As Musk says and Gore illustrates, this is all incredibly dumb. Yet most companies continue to allow managers to exist, slow things down, and gum up the works with power struggles and politics, in the face of simple logic that says they don't add value. Musk warns that people should get fired for getting in the middle of collaboration, yet that is at the very core of a manager's job -- to get in the middle of everything.
Unencumbered Communications
Do you want yours to be a great company with 100 percent engagement where everyone works for the company, instead of some incredibly dumb, departmental fiefdom? Eliminating the requirement to communicate through managers is a great step in that direction. A hundred large companies and thousands of smaller ones have already figured that out.
It's your turn.
原文链接：https://www.inc.com/chuck-blakeman/an-email-from-elon-musk-reveals-why-managers-are-always-a-bad-idea.html
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2017年10月31日
英文
HRTech dynamics (11.02 - 11.15)：Why the companies are still struggling with human resources analysis?
The followings are dynamics of HR technology last two weeks（11.02–11.15） from HRTechChina. There are three sections, divided into Hot news, Domestic financing / acquisition, Domestic product report.
If you have your own opinions, production, or information of HRTech, we are welcome your contribute to tougao@hrtechchina.com
Hot news
7 reasons to tell you：Why the companies are still struggling with human resources analysis?
Most human resource leaders realize the advantages of HR technology and HR analysis technology, but how many people can use this technology completely?
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10114
【HRTechChina】investment and financing in October
October 2015，there are 21 information of investment and financing of HR technology, and 2 information of acquisition from HRTechChina.
Investment and financing information: there are 9 information from China,12 from overseas.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10153
How is“Unicorn”welcome winter?
At present, there are 30 Unicorn company in China. Include company like Mi, DiDi, Meituan, Dianping. They are trying to rebuild people's lives with BAT. A point from HR to see how the 10 billion dollar club members in 2015 to layout and spend the winter.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/9983
Guest column: Opinion of Zhang Ximeng on how to solve the retention problem of SaaS bussiness customer using data analysis?
Everyone felt this year is belong to SaaS. From financal, user increasing to sales market, SaaS service are so hot this year. But still most of the SaaS company are facing the same problem----how to keep balance between value of customer and customer acquisition cost.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10081
【third party recruitment】October 2015 dynamic（second）
The following content are collected by Mr.Nai about Third Party recruitment dynamics and comment of Mr.Nai. The comment are personal views, welcome readers correct.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10051
Domestic financing / acquisition
LieMeng technology， the high level recruitment service platform. Finish the angel investment more than millions of Yuan
Recently, high level recruitment services platform LieMeng Technology announced: gained millions of RMB angel investment from GF XINDE Investment Management Co., Ltd. invested
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10149
Joint Office Space : COWORK announced that they gain the twenty million yuan angel investment
COWORK was formally established in May 2015, is engaged in the joint office space market
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/9927
Deep Q&A community ZhiHu gain 10 million dollars in C round of investment
At present, ZhiHu has become the most popular knowledge Q&A community in China. In 2010, ZhiHu get the angel investment of the creative works by Li Kaifu. One year later, gain ten millions of dollars of A round investment by Qiming . June 2014, ZhiHu complete twenty-two million dollars B round investment by Saif lead investor.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10011
WangLong spent 8 hundred million yuan acquisition of online education website Prometheus
WangLong Network Inc. announced they complete the 100% acquisition of Promethean interest in the transaction, the total cost of the acquisition is $1.3 billion.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10039
A MICE service platform announced, 100% acquisition the activity management platform HuiGe using ninety million yuan
On November 5, the online platform "HuiTang" announced in a total 9000 million yuan of formal acquisition the 100% shares and related brands of activities management platform "HuiGe".
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10030
Big data analysis service “Sensors Data” get six million yuan angel investment from XianXing & MingShi
Sensors Data which is a company provide big data analysis products and complete solutions for internet companies, as well as provide related data consulting and complete solutions for the traditional company.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10062
ShuJuTang the big data trading platform get B round investment of two hundred and forty million yuan
ShuJuTang develop from scientific research and artificial intelligence big data service providers. Now ShuJuTang services area is extended to the field of intelligent transportation, health care, financial credit, government big data operations, and more.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10100
XueTang Online complete seventeen million six hundred thousand dollars of investment，ready to developing the professional part
The online platform XueTang founded by the Qinghua University, announced the completion of the A+ round of investment $17600000, QiDi become the second largest shareholder of XueTang.
More content：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10138
Domestic product report
NeiQuan
Website :http://www.ineiquan.com
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/9930
Introduction :NeiQuan is a vertical recruitment platform for performing arts circle.
DuanGongBang
Website :http://www.duangongbang.com
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/9953
Introduction :DuanGongBang is a part time platform for collage student. Users can produce short video resume there.
JiZhi Data
Website :http://crowdsdom.com/
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10018
Introduction :JiZhi Data is the platform for Chinese data collect, label and clear. Help customers dealing with unstructured data quickly and low cost.
ZaYi
Website :http://www.za-yi.com/
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10069
Introduction :ZaYi a free job hosting and salary trading service platform.
JiJiaBan
Website :http://www.julanling.com/
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10096
Introduction :JiJiaBan is an application to record overtime for mobile To extend the blue collar workers dating service. Belong to Shanghai HuiXian Network Technology Co. Ltd.
DianTong
Website :http://www.dtthink.net/
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10103
Introduction :DianTong is a service platform focus on talent, technology and capital. Provide personnel recruitment, technical consulting, financing docking services for scientific and technological enterprises, processing and manufacturing enterprises.
YiMi Network
Website :http://www.1mi.cn/
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10166
Introduction :YiMi Network is a recruitment platform for blue collars, using O2O mobile internet technology to provide services for the enterprises and migrant workers.
KuaiLe +
Website：http://www.funacc.com/
Link：http://www.hrtechchina.com/archives/10160
Introduction :KuaiLe+ is a tax cloud management platform for micro enterprises.
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