Hello and welcome to our People Analytics course. This is Cade Massey, Professor of the practice here at the Wharton School in the Operations Information and Decisions Department. I'm joined by >> Matthew Bidwell, I'm an Associate Professor in the Management Department also at the Wharton School. >> I'm Martine Haas. I'm also an associate professor of management in the Wharton School. >> A lot of corporations say that people are their most important asset. In a sense, people analytics is about taking that idea seriously and behaving as if that were true. So if you think about what's happened in a lot of other fields over the last 10, 20 years, it's being the increasing use of data and analytics to make decisions. So if you think about finance, it's really being revolutionized by these quantitative models which they use to price assets, understand markets, occasionally to blow up the financial markets. But when they're not doing that, really to try and understand what's the way we can make profits? If you think about marketing, increasingly, and we have a marketing analytics course, which is really focusing on how people are now using more and more data to understand their customers better. To segment, to focus on how can we create products that they want, and how can we then really target our marketing towards them? The idea is to apply the same ideas to people, okay? In an organization when we manage people, we have to make a lot of different decisions, those decisions should be informed. So people analytics is really just the use of data and analytic tools to make better decisions about how we manage people. So a lot of the energy around people analytics are stemmed from two places. One is obviously this interest in if we can manage our people better, it's obviously gonna benefit the organization. The second place it comes from is the sense that we now have more and more data about what people are doing that we could actually put at the service of these decisions. Also for a while now organizations have been gathering data on the basics of their personnel. Their performance ratings every year, how they're being paid, what their jobs are, to give us a better sense of what's going on in the organization. Maybe be able to identify our high performers and so on. Increasingly that's being supplemented by other data. So we now see applicant tracking systems where we put in the details of everybody who applies to the job, so we can start to understand how we're screening them. We have to addition to that now workflow data. If you work in a call center, you're going to have your calls monitored, so we know how many calls you make every hour. What's the rate? How many people hang up on you? We have increasing data on customer satisfaction, as well, through the surveys you fill out at the end of those calls. So you know more and more about how people are performing. You can start to think about what's driving them. You see some of the same with software engineers, where more and more of their work is being monitored as they check various pieces of code into repositories and so on. We can start to analyze that. There are new dimensions of this with communication. More and more of our communication is happening in technology mediated ways. Through email, through telephone, through bulletin boards and so on. So, we can see who's talking to who. Start to understand where does collaboration happen? Who are the hubs within the organization? And even now we know where people are increasingly with wearables and other devices tracking people's location. And so we know more and more about what people are doing in the organization. And the idea is we can start to bring some of that data to bear on understanding how could we manage that better. So we've seen this in a wide variety of different kinds of decisions. So from the basics of actually figuring out what good performance means, and who's exhibiting it to making decisions about how to manage them. Who should we be hiring? Who should we promote? What are kind of the career paths that make sense within the organization? What do the collaboration patterns look like here? Who are our critical communicators? What can we do to get communication improved? On top of that, increasing so I wanna put data behind some of our decisions about how to manage overall programs. So there are often issues around is our training working? What's our return on investment on the training? Our new fast-track promotion scheme, is that a good idea or a bad idea? If we change incentives, what happens? Traditionally we've had to go by hunch and feel for making these decisions. Increasingly, though, we can put data behind them. That's really the promise here. People analytics is a field that's really been emerging over the last few years and where there's tremendous energy at the moment. Part of what we want to do during this course is transmit a little bit of that excitement to you. So we thought we'd just start by saying why do we get excited about it? At least Martine and I both have English backgrounds, so getting exciting is obviously challenging for either of us. But Cade is American, so I think he'll be able to tell us slightly better. Cade, what is it about people analytics that excites you? >> Well, where I come from academically is the decision making world, which mostly studies the mistakes people make, the biases they have in their judgment and in their decisions. And in recent years, we've gotten a little more interested in helping people fix that. Not just documenting the mistakes, but actually improving their decision-making. And data provides this great opportunity. It's not a panacea. There's no guarantee because you have data you make better decisions. But it is an opportunity to improve decision-making. And so it's this great new avenue for the decision-making world, and then the people side of things is just what I care the most about. So we have colleagues that study different elements of the business world. And you kind of choose what you are most passionate about, what I really care about is individuals. This is one of the main ways they are affected, how organizations treat them, who hires them, who promotes them. And it's one of the main ways that organizations then prosper or don't, because individuals and people are so important. So it's this intersection of better decision-making, which is my academic background, and people's lives and what people provide to organizations that I care most about. >> Martine? >> So my research is in the area of organizational behavior. And my main interest, what I'm really, spend a lot of time thinking about and studying and trying to figure out is how organizations can learn better from what they do in one part of the world, how they can transmit that learning so that they can do better in their operations in another part of the world. And of course it's people who are doing that, right? So it's people who are learning from each other, who are collecting information and experiencing and developing expertise in one part of the organization, one part of the world. How do they, how do other people, especially in large distributed organizations, learn from that? And so this is a very distinctive area in terms of people analytics. It's kind of how do people work together better in order to get their work done? So it's not so much the selection and hiring components, which you guys think about a lot. But really my focus is mostly on these collaboration elements. How can people work together more effectively and perform better as a result? And so, again, people analytics provides a really wealth of possible data to look at people collaborating because previously we've just had to sort of observe what people are doing. Are they talking to each other? Are they making phone calls? We've had some data, we can ask people in surveys some of this information. But especially in large organizations, where there's a lot of stuff going on, now we have increasing sources of data to enable us to really track how much people are using databases to store what they know, that somebody else can access from somewhere very far away, and maybe many months later. We have all sorts of interaction forms, communication through question and answer online formats. And obviously through conferences and all sorts of other ways. That we now are collecting data on to see where these things are effective and are helping people to do their work better. Or maybe they're just a time sink and you're spending way too much time trying to kind of access these sources of information. So trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work, what enables teams, individuals, and the organization as a whole to collaborate more effectively is really where my passion and interest in this field lies. >> Yeah, and I think my motivation is fairly similar. I mean I came at this from a study of employment relations and there I really got into this because I think many of the things that Cade's talking about that struck me. Where do we spend our time? At work. Where does our money come from that enables us to live? At work. Who produces staff, people in jobs within organizations and so to kind of, for me in order to understand what makes a good society or bad society is really now how well does employment work? How well is it organized? Certainly the hope is that by better analytics, putting better data, we can make better decisions, which would obviously be good for organizations, but hopefully a big part of this will also be providing better places for people to work where they will enjoy their work more and get more out of it. So that's my hope for this field.
