An employee's data is worth a happy meal on the black market, and $81.50 on LinkedIn. How much is it worth to your organisation?
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Workforce Analytics
A recent profile on NPR talks about the myriad ways in which UPS drivers are monitored in a way reminiscent of Frederick Winslow Taylor's Time and Motion Studies, and the benefits that this has for the organisation. Is this Workforce Analytics as Neo-Taylorism? What are the implications, and does the future of work look like a UPS truck?
Last week I had the honor of being invited to speak at the Melbourne HR Talent Community with Steve Pell of Intrascope Analytics. Steve and I discussed analytics for HR, why "Big Data" is all the rage, and why most of the valuable data about your workforce is already sitting inside your internal systems (Big Data or Small Data, it's all about the insights). The enclosed video is 8 minutes extracted from the 45+ minute conversation.
What is big data for HR, and how many of the players are using the term as a gimmick?
A collection of principles, laws, and effects that relate to the workplace
Alex Hagan appointed Adjunct Faculty at The Conference Board's Strategic Workforce Planning Academy. Click to read more...
By Alex Hagan
Back in November, Seth Godin wrote:
"Sometimes, we can't measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that's much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation."
We do this all the time in HR out of necessity - we measure employee satisfaction because there's a connection between satisfaction and productivity, for example; and it's difficult in many (but not all) roles to measure productivity directly. Godin goes on to explain how this can become a problem when we focus on the proxy (in this example, employee satisfaction) and forget the goal (in this example, employee productivity):
"...When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead"
I believe we often fall into this trap too - being obsessed with employee satisfaction metrics as if they are an end in themselves, forgetting that the point is to increase employee productivity - and that:
- There are many other paths to boosting employee productivity; and
- Not all of the ways to increase employee satisfaction will also increase employee productivity.
What are some other examples of the "false proxy trap" in HR?
(This post originally appeared at strategicworkforceplanning.blogspot.com, the other place I blog at from time to time)
Related articles
- Avoiding the false proxy trap (sethgodin.typepad.com)
