Max Blumberg, Ph.D., bridges the worlds of business performance and analytics to improve strategy execution, design powerful people processes and increase sales force effectiveness.

Max has deep experience and success with virtually every aspect of business design, performance, diagnosis, and execution. He first worked as a management consultant at Accenture. He next launched and successfully sold a large technology component distribution company. In the following chapter of his career, he was the new business director for two technology companies including IBM SPSS, simultaneously earning his Ph.D. in psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. While in graduate school he also launched the Blumberg Partnership, a Top 50 analytics consultancy which delivers analytics and machine learning solutions to organisations like Nestle, Lloyds Register, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, GB Group plc, Angle Technology, the BBC, Rentokil Initial, Barclays Corporate, Brit Insurance, the MOD, the CIPD, and Friends Provident.

Max’ expertise is truly unique, ranging from being a CEO to advising CEOs. His practical grounding in strategy, finance, economics, and HR, enabled him to develop a full systems approach that can be applied to diagnose and solve complex challenges arising from the operating model, organizational structure, and job design. He has deployed the methodology and state-of-the-art tools to help global companies deliver winning sales strategies, market segmentation, go-to-market strategies, sales force designs, and people processes. He has trained hundreds of MBA students on key aspects of the methodology, including the role of assets and capital in generating enterprise value, optimizing human capital, investment allocation, linkage analysis, and cutting-edge analytical techniques. At the University of London, he researches the key drivers of workforce performance.

In addition to his consulting and research, Max is a psychology commentator for various media outlets, contributes to Achievers Extraordinary (a charity empowering people to help themselves), is a personal fitness and Pilates trainer, and a keen musician (with one successful chart song from his youth).

What employee performance KPIs are potentially useful as inputs to HR analytics?

The usefulness of an employee performance KPI will depend on what it is trying to predict. For example, employee engagement and satisfaction may be useful for predicting retention, but not useful for predicting employee productivity.

In addition, employee performance KPIs that are useful in one organization may not be useful in another. For example, technical knowledge may predict sales performance at Tata whereas, at Air India, communications skills may be a better predictor.

The point is that in the same way that each company has its own unique culture, so it will also have its own unique KPIs that drive performance in that culture. Of course, some KPIs may be common across cultures; but if every company in an industry sector uses a similar “standard list” of KPIs, then there is no way that each company can use its people as competitive differentiators. For example, if two newspapers use exactly the same performance KPIs for their journalists and editors, then neither company has a unique differentiating workforce advantage over the other.

How can HR Analytics enhance employee performance?

The best way to use HR Analytics to enhance employee performance is to ask why employee performance needs enhancing in the first place. There’s no point in spending money on HR Analytics to enhance employee performance if there are no performance issues.

If there is a performance issue, proceed as follows:

1. Establish which job family or families are experiencing the performance issue.
2. Use focus groups and interview to ask employees and managers of those job families to suggest what KPIs might be causing those performance issues. You’ll usually find that it you end up with a list of 7 – 10 suggested or hypothesized KPIs.
3. Now measure the level of those hypothesized KPIs for each employee in that job family.
4. Use statistical analysis to ask the question: Which of the hypothesized KPIs most accurately distinguishes between low and high performers in that job family?
5. Take the KPIs which distinguish between high and low performers and embed them in your recruitment process so that you recruit applicants who exhibit the high performer KPIs, and in your learning & development processes so that develop those high performer KPIs in your existing employees.

So instead of using a “standard list” of KPIs, we have benchmarked your own job families to create recruitment and development processes that deliver high performance in your business culture, and which will differentiate you from your competitors.

What do CEOs/CHROs look for in employee performance analytics?

CEOs are not generally interested in employee performance metrics and KPIs. What CEOs want to know is: I am spending Rs 5 CR on my workforce (recruitment, learning, compensation, etc): what is my return on investment (ROI)? Could I earn a greater ROI if invested in robotic automation rather than people?

CHROs, on the other hand, are most interested in KPIs that affect the whole workforce such as engagement, absence rates, and so on.

In contrast, operational managers are most interested in individual employee performance because if employees do not achieve their performance targets, it is the operational managers – not HR – who will be accountable for these missed targets.

What metrics do operational managers look for? Most performance management systems emphasize standard lists of competencies based on the assumption that those competencies will deliver the productivity required for the manager to achieve their operational targets. However, unless the company uses a process like the one described in question 2 above, they have no way of knowing whether those competencies lead to high performance or not.

What is missing in terms of employee performance data that could make HR Analytics even more meaningful?

What is missing is ways of measuring employee productivity more directly instead of relying on competency measures which may or may not predict employee performance and productivity. Unfortunately, most companies seem to invest more time in simple basic activities like reporting, visualization, and storytelling than in working out how to calculate productivity in various job roles.

Can HR Analytics play a prescriptive role in helping employee finetune performance real-time?

Yes, it is possible to monitor employee factors like stress and emotional state in real time, and then feed these back to employees via mobile device alerts that, for example, it is time to take a break. Companies like Humanyze are technically already in a position to deliver such capabilities. Some, however, might suggest that this technology is too “intrusive”. Society will need to decide what level of real-time employee monitoring is and is not acceptable.