Born and raised in New Zealand, after graduating with a Degree in Human Resources, Greg spent 15 years traveling the world and building increasingly large and complex traditional HRIS solutions.
At one time, Greg loved HRIS so much he wrote a book on it, but became disillusioned when he realized that “real” business people seldom saw any link between the data that was being stored and maintained in the HRIS system and the work they were doing to increase revenue, drive productivity and ultimately make more money.
Armed with that frustration, Greg joined TrustSphere in 2014 to help build an HR analytics product that the business would demand to get access to – because it would provide such actionable insights into how employees actually created value within their organization.
Four years later the team at TrustSphere have built one of the worlds most advanced Organizational Network Analytics platforms and are helping a wide range of analytically focused customers revolutionize a whole range of HR processes from HiPos, Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion and High Performing Teams.
What are the key aspects of employee performance that are critical to the success of HR Analytics?
The relationship between people and organizations is undergoing radical change, driven by the digital revolution, globalization, demographic shifts, and empowered consumers. In this environment, a new model of continuous performance management is emerging, and it relies on frequent, two-way dialogue between managers and employees. Employees are also actively soliciting real-time, constructive feedback and development opportunities from their managers to determine whether they are still focused on the right goals. Managers are acting as coaches, offering frequent feedback on employee performance on short-term goals and “feed-forward” on future development needs. So not only is the type of performance feedback changing, but the speed of performance feedback is also changing.
In parallel to this, I believe there is a drive to align individual performance more closely with business outcomes. As organizations become more team-centric, performance management is also beginning to shift from focusing just on an employee’s individual achievements to evaluating her contribution to a team and the team’s impact on driving overall business goals.
Therefore I think the most important things that contribute to employee performance are probably not data points that are stored in a traditional HR system or data warehouse. For example, in today’s team networks, I believe the biggest measure of individual employee’s performance lies in their ability to build a network of strong working relationships, to be able to collaborate, influence, gain access to a diversity of thought and to most importantly drive innovation and change. Therefore I think understanding an employee’s network is critical to understanding how they contribute to their teams, create value and ultimately perform. While evaluating team performance, trust, inclusion, diversity, and clarity of roles become relevant. Team leaders must be hands-on and actively engaged. And teams must be connected to other teams to succeed.
Therefore measuring value-creating organizational networks, team dynamics and group goal systems are critical to the success of HR analytics.
How can HR Analytics enhance employee performance?
In today’s data-rich environment, and in the context of continuous performance management, HR Analytics is emerging as a powerful enabler by generating real-time insights, at scale. In fact, in today’s environment of IoT, continuous listening, etc and as more and more information gets created, better data insights can be generated, which in turn are bringing more clarity to employee performance and drive continuous improvement.
But for HR Analytics to enhance employee performance, companies must find out what drives performance for their highly individualized situations. Therefore the most important thing that HR leaders must do is to understand what the business means by performance as opposed to HR’s typically fluffy definition. The business always defines performance in terms of financial impact. So for HR Analytics teams to be able to enhance business performance, they need to step outside the traditional HR dataset and access real business performance data. For example by accessing data from CRM systems, financial performance figures, production data, and customer feedback. Once they have access to all this data, then they can start to see how employee and team data correlates with financial performance and business impact.
What do CEOs/CHROs look for in employee performance analytics?
I believe the CEO’s are looking for data to support them in making tough decisions about who can help them compete and grow market share and revenue. I don’t think that they want to look at this at an individual level, but they want an aggregated view so they can see how teams departments and groups of employees are supporting revenue growth, innovation and business priorities like the move to Agile working. They need the data at a level that they can influence it, and I think the individual level is usually too granular.
Driven by the overwhelming disappointment in the existing approaches to performance management, CHROs are looking for systems that support more-informal performance review cultures such as platforms that provide “journals” to allow managers and employees to document the results of coaching and feedback discussions. In an environment of increasingly decentralized workforces. I think CHROs and good managers are looking for technology that delivers well-timed and targeted nudges, rather than blanket states. For example insights into how well an employee is building working relationships, how diverse their network is and how effective they are at communicating with their colleagues create a whole raft of coachable moments, instead of just labeling someone as “below expectations”.
I think the next big requirement from CEOs/CHROs is going to be for continuous listening. Increasingly I see the business expecting HR Analytics teams to quickly be able to test a hypothesis, implement a business change, retest the hypothesis and explain the business impact in shorter and shorter cycles. So the need for continuous listening and real-time data is going to be critical to improving business/employee performance.
What is missing in terms of employee performance data that could make HR Analytics even more meaningful?
To date, HR and HR Analytics teams have been trying to understand employee performance by storing, reporting and analyzing a whole lot of data that is labeled as “Human Capital” data. This data set usually includes employees skills, experience, qualifications, etc; the problem is that this data doesn’t provide much insight into an employee’s performance and it’s incredibly static.
But what we are really excited about at TrustSphere is understanding an employee’s performance by measuring their Social Capital, which is their ability to build networks, relationships, exert influence, collaborate and communicate. Research shows that the ability to build relationships is the single biggest predictor of an employees performance, and that’s becoming increasingly important in today’s “networked team” organizations. These Social Capital capabilities are a measure of an employee’s connectedness across her team, department, rest of the organization and with external parties, through which she collaborates to get her work done. We believe this is critical to understand what enables some employees to perform and others to struggle with performance.
Additionally, I think HR Analytics teams need to look at how the organization functions as an informal, human network. By rolling individual’s Social Capital data up into their formal and informal teams, HR Analytics teams can move beyond the typical myopic individual level analysis and to see how work actually gets done. With this data, HR Analytics teams can then address real business problems like how to make the transition to Agile, increasing Diversity and Inclusion and creating high performing sales teams, all of which relate to how groups of people work together.
Can HR Analytics play a prescriptive role in helping employee finetune performance real-time?
The prescriptive role played by HR Analytics in helping employees fine-tune their performance in real-time has been fairly limited, to date. This was largely due to the lack of access to relevant data. However as HR Analytics and technology matures, new sources of data open up and in parallel employees attitudes towards the use of data also mature, I see a big move to democratize employee data and create more data transparency.
Increasingly employees want to know what data the organization is storing about them and how that is being used to judge their potential, their performance and their ability to create value. So I see it as a big challenge to HR and HR Analytics teams to start sharing data with employees in a way that they can then use it to increase their own performance, their skills and ultimately develop themselves as humans. For example by showing an employee their real-time Social Capital data, where their networks are strong or weak, how influential they, how good they are at collaborating, how they compare to their teammate’s networks and what types of networks they will need to build to be more effective in their role.
I believe the best way to do help employees to improve their own performance is to provide perfectly timed gentle nudges within their day to day work and tools, rather than any new stand-alone products or pieces of technology.
Related Resources:
- Using Organizational Network Analytics (ONA) to measure the impact of Leadership Development
- Organizational Network Analytics and the Future of Work (Feature #4 – WSR April-June 2018) Antony Ebelle-Ebanda and Greg Newman, Trustsphere
- Retain or let go? The data that you need to react correctly when an employee resigns
- How can we better identify HiPos using network data?
- Why Informal Networks Are Set To Revolutionize HR And People Analytics
- Burnout – how to measure the biggest threat to employee engagement with just four variables
