People Analytics Case Studies 2016

Wegmans Food Markets

Google’s re:Work site is a marvellous resource when it comes to best practice and case studies on data-driven and people-centric HR. One example describes how Wegmans Food Markets sought to tackle the challenge of escalating healthcare costs as the organisation scaled rapidly. Rather than arbitrarily changing the employee benefits package (and reducing costs), Wegmans wanted to understand how employees comparatively valued these benefits so employee satisfaction could also be improved. By using a conjoint analysis, Wegmans found that health benefits were a deciding factor as to whether employees joined and also stayed at the organisation. Indeed, the analysis found that offering even basic healthcare coverage to employees who were not currently eligible would drive significant incremental value due to how highly employees regarded healthcare benefits. The results of the analysis showed that a $107 investment per non-eligible employee would cost $1.5 million but would feel like $32.5 million to the employees. Accordingly, Wegmans was able to control costs without reducing employee satisfaction.

Chevron

One of the most impressive stories on building organisational capability in people analytics comes from RJ Milnor and his team at Chevron. Building a people analytics team is a challenge, but to sustain and scale it across a global organisation of 58,000 employees in 60 countries is infinitely more difficult. This detailed Bersin by Deloitte Case Study walks the reader through the two-year journey at Chevron. It describes how Chevron tackled its challenge to scale, unify and grow analytics capabilities globally across the company, making it an essential skill for all HR professionals and ultimately turn people analytics into a competitive advantage. Chevron needed to switch focus on analytics from HR to the business and took the following steps to achieve this:

• implementing a vision and mission statement to help create an identity,
• consistently reviewing the metrics that are tracked to check for continued business relevance, and
• creating a prioritisation mechanism for all analytics projects.

Building organisational capability centred on two main strategies:

• launching a Community of Practice, which as of September 2016 comprised 300 members spread across 22 business units and 18 countries, and;
• building a three-stage in-house analytics curriculum that serves to create a structured learning and development program in analytics.

This multi-pronged approach has helped create a vast and virtual people analytics team and effectively changed the way HR and the business thinks. With this firm foundation in place, Chevron is well-positioned to derive the competitive advantage it seeks from its investment in people analytics.

Google

More has been written about Google’s successes with people analytics than any other organisation. The re:Work site has a fantastic description of Project Aristotle, which sought to understand “What makes a team effective at Google?”. One of the possible outcomes of a people analytics project (or experiment) is that no significant insights are found. This was initially the case with Project Aristotle – two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness. As Abeer Dubey, part of Google’s fabled People Analytics team and a leader on the project explained “at Google, we’re good at finding patterns, but there weren’t strong patterns here”. Despite this setback the team persevered and eventually found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together, arriving at five key factors:

1. Psychological Safety: Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.
2. Dependability: Team members get things done on time and meet Google´s high bar for excellence.
3. Structure & Clarity: Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals.
4. Meaning: Work is personally important to team members.
5. Impact: Team members think their work matters and creates change.

Capgemini

This case study is penned by Maja Luckos, Head of People Analytics. It is a detailed description of how the organisation moved from static reporting focused on silos and the past to the creation of a tool that now offers access to key human capital data and insights in one place. Highlights of the cast study:

• the step-by step description of first winning the hearts and minds of the HR Leadership team, then the setting up definitions before the tool was actually built,
• how the process has effectively raised not only confidence levels in the business of HR but also of HR in itself and is allowing them to connect people analytics with business issues, and;
• how Capgemini is now seeking to turn the tool into a commercial product. HR as a profit centre? You’d better believe it! Maja is to be congratulated on her ingenuity, determination and success.

Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse calculated that a one-point reduction in regretted attrition saves the bank $75 million to $100 million a year – that’s a number guaranteed to get attention from top management. This article in the Wall Street Journal describes how three years of analysis at the bank highlighted the importance of internal mobility in making employees more ‘sticky’. This insight saw recruiters increase the number of roles posted internally to 80% (from less than half) and recruiters using attrition probability scores to actively call employees to discuss a change of role. The article goes on to describe a project Credit Suisse undertook to investigate why women with certain job titles left the company at higher rates than men. Moreover, examples from Micron, Box, Walmart and AOL are also touched upon in the article.

Ernst & Young

This interview on HR Dive with Blair Hopkins, Director of Global People Data, Reporting & Analytics gives an impressive overview of the analytics journey at EY. The article describes some of the challenges faced, which include the need to work with HR leaders in 155 countries, securing budget for people and technology, imbuing analytical skills in HR professionals and the need to prioritise projects. These are challenges many large organisations are experiencing as their people analytics journeys unfold. Nevertheless, the article also touches on some of the successes:

• the team made employee retention relevant to the business by converting retention rate to a dollar value,
• significant progress has been made in the area of engagement, and;
• insights have been provided in the areas of diversity and inclusion, recruitment, development, learning and performance management.

Mass Mutual

Eddie Ahmed, CHRO of Mass Mutual, has a clear definition of the three things he believes defines the HR function:

• help the business achieve better than average returns,
• build leadership capabilities that are aligned with company strategy, and
• run HR as a business focused on operational efficiency and using tools to enable better decision making.

Naturally, People Analytics is pivotal to realising these goals and in this brilliant podcast with Michael Housman of hiQ Labs, Ahmed describes the people analytics journey at Mass Mutual so far and his current focus areas of retention, productivity and employee wellness. It’s certainly an inspirational listen and I’ll be watching the story unfurl with interest.

Shell

As it is for many large global organisations, cyber security incidents are a clear and present challenge for Shell. The People Analytics team sought to analyse what are the people characteristics that can accurately predict a cyber security incident. The main findings were:

• phishing incidents drop in line with the first five years tenure before increasing,
• in contrast the tendency to download a virus increases with tenure over the first five years before dropping off, and
• correlations were also found with Skill and Assignment types.

This enabled the team to create an algorithm that meant Shell could target only the employees most likely to breach cyber security with awareness campaigns and still reduce the number of actual incidents that would occur. Shell reduced the employee population that was likely to invoke an incident from 47% to 16%. The project delivered cost savings through the targeted awareness campaign, lower risk and improved employee productivity.

Adidas

Stefan Hierl, Senior Manager of People Analytics at Adidas, was interviewed recently by Inside HR. The article describes the three core pillars of Adidas’ people analytics strategy:

• align with the business to define what success looks like,
• use data and insights to improve the employee experience, and
• support broader strategic decision-making.

Microsoft

There´s an excellent article by Microsoft CHRO Kathleen Hogan. This article is important for a number of reasons:

• having a CHRO who not only sponsors but is deeply involved in the work is a key trend in successful people analytics initiatives,
• the focus on employee productivity is arguably the Holy Grail that people analytics can help unlock for organisations,
• the drive to personalise data and put it in the hands of the employee so they can use it to enhance their career and performance is paramount to imbue employee trust and thus secure the future of people analytics.

Dawn Klinghoffer, Head of People Analytics at Microsoft, has been doing analytics on people data for 13 years and is one of the organisations pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

Cisco

Ian Bailie is doing some wonderful work at the tech giant and touches on a number of areas:

• how Ian at Cisco has built analytics capability at Cisco,
• how analytics supports talent acquisition and people planning, and
• the great work Ian and his team are doing to benefit the business and employees with the Cisco Talent Cloud.

HP

One of the oldest and most widely known people analytics cases comes from HP, who has been applying a flight risk score to its 300,000+ employees since 2011. This seminal article by Eric Siegel describes how the project was conceived together with the sensitivity applied in terms of who within the organisation has visibility on the employees predicted to leave. Predicting attrition is typically one of the first projects tackled by a new people analytics team. This is not surprising given

• attrition is a challenge faced by the majority of organisations, and
• the cost of attrition can be high.

Siegel’s article estimates that HP was set to save $300m that otherwise would have been lost to lower productivity and replacing leavers. That is a number guaranteed to get any business leader to sit up and take notice.