Dear visitor!
It has been just five days since the great conference in and from London on People Analytics ended. But the full two day program from April 19 to 20 with more than 50 events with use cases from well-known companies, demonstrations from vendors, several panel discussions and insights from leading experts had a major impact on the more than 550 participants on site and online.
We watched for example what the Merck Group is doing in digital skills assessment and learning, how Citi is calculating the Return on Investment on their talent strategy and how Unilever works with a non-classical people data strategy to get better insights.
Did you attend? Or was your working load to high and time was missing? Then I have good news: You can watch many of the presentations online by video-on-demand just by signing in for a little fee. A good start of course is to read the agenda of conference website and pick what interests you most.
I also did watch just some of the presentations but will go back soon to check the other use cases out (and to write my use case report, see post script 1 below).
Which leads me to the central question: What can German large and middle-sized companies learn from those use cases? Many of use case providers are very big, international operating, or focused on a particular geographic area and industry. And therefore have significant more financial, technological and human resources to deal with the digital transformation and data-driven approaches in Human Resource management.
It occurred to me that although resources, specific domains, and individual challenges differ, many speakers came up with some general rules and suggestion for best practice in People Analytics – And pointed out to new approaches and processes that one might also try within their own people challenges.
And it is good to see what today with smart tools like advanced analytics, machine learning, and organisation network analysis can be done to tackle old (and new) problems for with new insights and actions.
Yesterday I did a little use case analytics on the practice examples shown and selected 20 of them. You can find the results together with important figures on the companies in the accompanying table in the header.
As you can see many of the use cases come from leading companies in their industry and seven countries (USA, GB, NL, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Germany). Regarding the industry we see that a quarter of the use cases come from companies in financial services, four are into pharmaceuticals and three specified on telecommunications. Eight companies come from another industry.
So we have a great range of application fields of the use cases in terms of industry, company size (number of employees, financial indicators), and focus of the People Analytics use case presented in the conference. But keep in mind that regarding the company size the use cases stem, with one exception, from companies with more than 10,000 people – 14 of them have even more than 50,000 employees.
That is human resources managers in smaller or medium-sized companies should keep in mind that starting in People Analytics or setting goals should fit where your company stands in terms of people data management, and what resources are there.
Nevertheless, as said above, take from the use cases what suits you best – And start rather smaller than thinking about climbing the Mount Everest.
Best wishes with your People Analytics project!
Stefan Klemens
PS 1: Use Case Report: Note that I will publish shortly a paper in which I describe some of the use cases in more detail in a structured and comparable way – Together with lessons learned and my personal view on it. Connect with me on LinkedIn to get your free PDF copy or send me a message via the contact form.
PS 2: Do you like to talk about your People Analytics Project? Discuss your challenge with an independent person? Or do you have a question about how People Analytics, Data Science, and AI can make more of your data to solve your tasks better? Then contact me as well for a coffee talk at a video-conference (or personally in the nearby area of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany).
