If you’re in #peopleanalytics and have not attended People Analytics World, I highly recommend!
We have a special community of people who really care about helping people and organizations thrive. So thankful to be part of it. From deep philosophical musings over dinner with People Analytics OGs Amit Mohindra, Ian OKeefe, Al Adamsen, and Manish G., stellar talks by David Green 🇺🇦, Richard Rosenow, Cole Napper, et al., fun employee listening conversation with my fellow panelists Nicole Lettich, Kalifa Oliver, Ph.D., Paulina Nuñez Candiani, and Michael M. Moon, PhD, and exciting product discussions with vendors like Worklytics, One Model, and Revelio Labs that are accelerating innovation and impact in our field, I enjoyed every minute! Thanks Barry Swales and the Tucana team for organizing a great event.
✨ My top 5 practical takeaways from the conference ✨
1️⃣ Add real value. Balance an ideal of ‘scalable’ solutions against opportunities to provide material value in the immediate term. Think outside the box (beyond standard HR measures), and focus on understanding drivers of business impact. This requires deep cross-functional partnerships since HR doesn’t own these data, but there is low-hanging fruit (e.g., mining financial statements to correlate revenue and profit per FTE with perceptive and behavioral data).
2️⃣ Less is more. When presenting results, focus less on data and more on simple, engaging stories. People don’t remember data; they remember stories. Stakeholders aren’t going to learn a new language in order to interpret the information we need to convey, so the onus is on us to translate data into a language that connects easily with our audience.
3️⃣ Understand the full people data supply chain. Data are not wrong; they are merely a manifestation of the upstream rigor (or lack thereof) applied to operational business processes and technology. Companies that want AI must invest in data quality, and this requires tight alignment across people ops, tech, and analytics teams.
4️⃣ Invest in employee listening. Employee listening programs become even more valuable by complementing experience and lifecycle surveys with organizational network analysis (ONA) from both active and ambient data sources, focus groups, signals in movement data, and social listening (e.g., sentiment on Glassdoor, Blind).
5️⃣ Leverage AI to increase effectiveness. AI is shaping how we deliver value — from improving how humans interface with applications to automated data model design, deck creation and narrative summaries, teams are becoming far better equipped to provide strategic decision support to stakeholders when and where it’s needed.
