People Analytics For Dummies®
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Copyright © 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931481
ISBN: 978-1-119-43476-4; 978-1-119-43483-2 (ebk); 978-1-119-43479-5 (ebk)
You might already be familiar with how the power of data analytics has transformed the fields of marketing, sales, supply chain management, or finance. You may also be familiar with the idea that people are a company’s greatest investment. Well, like peanut butter and chocolate eventually found their way into a delicious treat, these two ideas found their way together, too — the happy result is called people analytics.
Welcome to People Analytics For Dummies, a book written for people open to the idea that there need not be any contradiction between what makes companies great places to work and great at producing business results. People analytics is built on the premise that what makes companies great is people, and that what can make more companies great when it comes to people is data analysis. Not any kind of analysis — specifically, the analysis of people at work.
In this book, you'll find an introduction to the data, metrics, and analysis at the basis of this new field called people analytics. Because it’s a new field, this may be the first time you’re hearing anything at all about it or, like most of the people doing the work today, you’re figuring it out as you go along. In any case, even if you’re familiar with people analytics already, this book may introduce you to new ways of approaching your work and may also provide you with some tips on how best to explain to others exactly what you do. (It never hurts to be able to express clearly and succinctly to others the importance of the work you do.)
This is a book about making important management decisions about people by using data analysis rather than whim or instinct. This is a book about getting great business results while at the same time creating a great place for people to work. This is a book about finding a way to be a great company that relies on continuous feedback and learning rather than a mediocre company that's satisfied with either doing it the way it's always been done or that tries to keep up by slavishly copying the competition. This book is the recipe for getting the highest possible individual, team, and company performance while also making employees happier!
In People Analytics For Dummies, I talk about the ways that analysis can connect human resources decisions to business strategy as well as offering an overview of some of the nuts-and-bolts of how to do the analysis. You'll find out about gathering data about your employees at different stages of their careers, detecting patterns from the data, making predictions, and measuring the consequences of the actions you take. You'll find out how to use data to continuously improve the methods you use to attract, activate, and retain talented people so that you can achieve higher levels of productivity.
When I can, I include real-world examples from companies I have worked with — big and small — so that you can learn from the real world how to collect and analyze data in ways that can help you make better business decisions across a wide variety of human resources management topics: recruiting, performance, rewards, learning and development, leadership, diversity, and attrition. These examples show you the broad variety of opportunities for a smart application of people analytics.
Whether you're an executive, a human resources professional, or an analyst, you’ll find something in this book for you.
To get the most from this book, I assume that you
Throughout this book, you’ll see these little graphical icons to identify useful paragraphs:
The Tip icon marks tips and shortcuts that you can take to make a specific task easier.
The Remember icon marks the information that’s especially important to know. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, just skim these paragraphs.
The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you can safely skip over without harm.
The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches. Warning: Don’t skip over these warnings!
The book is arranged into five self-contained parts, each composed of several self-contained chapters. By self-contained, I mean that I do my best to tell you everything you need to know about a single topic inside each chapter. But I admit that more than a few times I had to put references to other parts of the book when it wasn’t reasonably possible to cover in one chapter everything that’s important to know.
The possibilities for adventure are truly endless, but start where you are right now. Whether you’re an executive, HR professional, or analyst, you'll find something worth reading in People Analytics For Dummies.
Here is an overview:
These early chapters serve as a primer on people analytics. In this part, you learn to walk before you run, but what you find here lays the foundation for all that comes later. You’ll see my definition of people analytics and find an introduction to its important concepts, applications, and options. You may be especially pleased at the nontechnical nature of the first part. Not much bit-bytes or psychobabble is necessary because, as you see in Part 1, people analytics is about business first, people second, analysis third, and systems last.
It is unfortunate that most people think of analytics as something that is necessarily abstract, complex, or foreign to what they do. In the beginning of Part 2, you get to see how simply counting people up in different ways and looking at the results can help you gain new perspectives on things you do all the time. The fact is, the methods of people analytics need not be abstract, complex, or foreign — they can just be empirically valid ways of better doing what you always do.
If you read the entire part, you'll have learned some basic methods to get more perspective on how people produce value for businesses (or don’t), have gained insight into why results vary, and have seen how, with careful attention to the right level of detail, you can focus your efforts to get value out of analytics faster. The absence of a business value orientation leads analytics into dead ends and trivial pursuits.
In this part, I define a universal measurement framework for human resources centered around two different but related concepts: the employee journey and something I call the triple-A framework"
The combination of the employee journey and the triple-A framework can unify otherwise disparate and competing efforts by providing a single, unified measurement framework that relates employee and company needs with data.
After an introduction to the employee journey in Chapter 8, you'll find more detail on the methods of measurement and analysis in each of the three A’s that follow: attraction (Chapter 9), activation (Chapter 10), and attrition (Chapter 11).
Analytics are all about using data to increase certainty. This is rooted in, at a minimum, math and science, but the analysis of people builds on the knowledge of diverse methods and caveats developed from hundreds of years of research in psychology, sociology, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Most of the current writing on people analytics is either so high-level as to not include any mention of how-to specifics or is pretty difficult to read if you don’t already have an extensive background in systems, behavioral science, or statistics. I can’t do justice to anything that is typically taught in a 6- to-8-year PhD program for the aforementioned topics, but I have carefully selected a few versatile tools that can get you started on your journey and that you can keep using for a lifetime of contributions.
If you have ever read another book in the For Dummies series, this part of the book is like seeing an old friend again — the friend might be wearing a different outfit, but you will recognize the person right away. The Part of Tens is a collection of interesting people analytics learnings, advice, and warnings broken out into ten easy-to-digest chunks. There are ten misconceptions, ten pitfalls, ten design principles and the like. These chapters crystalize some concepts you get a chance to read in the rest of the book, or a way to get right to the concepts that matter if you haven’t.
It used to be that a book started on the first page and ended on the last — not any more. The digital revolution has not just changed the way we buy books, it has also changed the way we write and read books. I have created a plethora of online resources that go together with this book to assist you on your people analytics journey. These items fit more readily on the World Wide Web than they do between the covers of the book (and in doing so saves a few trees in the process). Importantly, these resources can be updated, searched, shared, cut and paste from and downloaded as pdfs.
Two resources I am the most excited about sharing are the HR Metric Definitions Guide and a guide to great sample employee survey questions. At the current time, these are the most comprehensive mainstream sources for obtaining information in this format.
Extras: All People Analytics For Dummies online support resources are accessible for easy download at www.dummies.com/go/peopleanalyticsfd.
Cheat Sheet: If you are looking for the traditional For Dummies Cheat Sheet, visit www.dummies.com and type People Analytics For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box.
People analytics is a vast domain containing a lot to learn — human resource management, behavioral science, technology systems and statistics, for starters. Unfortunately, one book cannot do justice to all of these topics, but fortunately that’s why there is more than one book in this world (and people to help write them).
Aside from an introduction to something you may not have known much about before, what I aim to do in this book is cover that area of knowledge necessary for a successful application of people analytics not already covered by other books. I provide a unique (if not sometimes strange) point of view about what really matters, honed over many years of practical experiences in the field. What I have to say often isn’t what people thought they would find, but I have seen success and I have seen failure, and I stand by what I think is important enough to share in this format. If you are looking to obtain more depth in a specific technical domain, there are plenty of resources you can turn to in order to go deeper — not the least of which are other For Dummies books.
Other For Dummies books: You can use a number of related books to drill down into topics I could only briefly touch on in this book — for example, Data Warehousing For Dummies (by Thomas C. Hammergren), Business Intelligence For Dummies (by Swain Scheps), SQL All-in-One For Dummies (By Allen G. Taylor), Python For Dummies (by Stef and Aahz Maruch), Predictive Analytics For Dummies (by Anasse Bari, Mohamed Chaouchi, and Tommy Jung), Data Science For Dummies (by Lillian Pierson), Business Statistics For Dummies (by Alan Anderson), R For Dummies (by Andrie de Vries and Joris Meys), Statistical Analysis with R For Dummies (by Joseph Schmuller), Social Psychology For Dummies (by Daniel Richardson), Excel Dashboards & Reports For Dummies (by Michael Alexander), Data Visualization For Dummies (by Mico Yuk and Stephanie Diamond), Tableau For Dummies (by Molly Monsey and Paul Sochan), and Agile Project Management For Dummies (by Mark C. Layton and Steven J. Ostermiller), all published by Wiley. Any and all of these books can produce valuable knowledge, skills, and abilities that can be used to become a more effective leader, implementer, and consumer of people analytics.
You don’t need to read this book from cover to cover. You can, if that strategy appeals to you, but it’s set up as a reference guide, so you can jump in wherever you need to. Looking for something in particular? Take a peek at the table of contents or index, find the section you need, and then flip to the page to resolve your problem.
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Discover exactly what people analytics is
Make the business case for a people analytics project and figure out where to begin (all at the same time!)
Understand the differences between an insight-oriented analytics project and an efficiency-oriented analytics project
Get acquainted with a matrix of current options for managing people analytics moving forward