TECHNOLOGY

The people lie,

numbers don't
approach to HR analytics
BY SUMEET VARGHESE
he idea that Data (of the wide
and "wild" variety) is required to
run any form of Analytics (Big or
Small) has not really caught on
with "some" HR professionals, at
least the ones I have spoken to. When I
say "some" you may take it to mean
"many", since I always keep statistical
sampling requirements in mind whenever
I strike a conversation with anyone in HR
(a "few' therefore might just represent
the "many" out there, If I am right about

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August 2015

HR professionals must closely study the kind of

work being done by their Marketing and
Customer Service Analytics teams to figure out
that Big Data Tools have evolved to a point
where they rarely ever care a byte if your data
is structured and/or unstructured.

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TECHNOLOGY
my sampling). This means that when
I speak to you, I always consider you
first as part of an important data-set
- either by virtue of your title, your
experience in the HR function.
You see we are always collecting
data from each other, whether
others like it or not, but what we do
with that data in HR is something I
will reserve for another post some
other day. For the moment though,
let me clarify: HR Departments are
caught in a position where they may
have too much of data and very poor
analytics capabilities to leverage the
data or strong analytics capabilities
but hardly any worthwhile data to
mine for insights. Frankly, I have no
clue which one is better!
Anyways, the sad/good news is
that we need to sort out many serious
data related issues before we can
discuss the extent to which our
neighbours in Marketing, Customer
Service, Finance and Operations use
Big Data Analytics:

Is the Data we capture of

any value at all?
Unfortunately, no one has an answer.
In one case, I asked a group of HR
professionals whether we should
track the number of loo breaks that
senior executives took during a
workshop and whether it would
serve any purpose. Obviously, there
were blank stares. My question of
course wasn't pointless. The loo like
the office water cooler and the
cofee/tea vending machine points in
an organization is as much a space
for exchanging workshop feedback
as it is for updating each other on
some juicy company gossip. While
this may be a small unwanted detail
to be avoided by the HR professional
it might certainly be of interest to a
Data Scientist, assuming it can offer
some interesting clues - Elementary,
my
dear
HR
Professional,
Elementary! Strangely, with a little
bit of luck I was able to work out a
correlation (not causation) between
the pathetic condition of the loos
used by the top management at one
firm and the MD's constant refrain
that the organization lacked
"ownership". In fact, nobody (and
this included the organization's top

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brass) bothered to complain about

the stink because they thought it
wasn't "their job".
Frankly, HR professionals must
closely study the kind of work being
done by their Marketing and
Customer Service Analytics teams to
figure out that Big Data Tools have
evolved to a point where they rarely
ever care a byte if
your data is
structured and/or
unstructured. So, if
you
have
an
employee's leave
records in XL, the
poor unsuspecting
chap's FB Posts and
Tweets for a full year
in Word, the person's
performance appraisal
history in PDF, and his/
her Compensation Data
in any format that your
ERP spits out, some
meaningful analytics can still
be derived even if this
employee record is a gibberish
amalgamation of data. For instance,
some recruiters have long studied
behaviour patterns of candidates
before, during and after the various
stages of a screening process that
they have been subjected to. Thanks
to these studies we now know that if
you handle a particular stage of the
recruitment
process
poorly,
candidates are two times or three
times more likely to badmouth the
company's products and services on
social media. Obviously, in this case
process feedback (quantitative and
qualitative data) at each stage of the
screening cycle has been correlated
with social media behaviour
(qualitative data) of the candidates.

A. People models
I remember studying Van der Waal's
equation in school - the final
derivation of the equation, which
obviously had more variables than
the one initially proposed, was
developed to fit the "reality" out
there because tests/experiments
revealed the equation had not quite
nailed it. If People Models are "work
in progress", People Analytics
Departments can rub shoulders with

their scientific peers - if not, such

models run the risk of being exposed
by a Copernican revolution (which
obviously would happen on the
business side first!). We do know for
a fact that the

famed/notorious 25 layered (rounds)

screening process (possibly, state-ofthe-art at that point in time) at Google
gave way to a four layered (rounds)
screening process partly because
business managers wanted "good"
people in "quickly". I am assuming,
Van der Waal was under no such
pressure.

B. Operational experiments
Google did a great job of
experimenting with plate size to
figure out an optimal shape that
could meet its target of kicking
employees back into shape (guilt and
shame worked powerfully to reduce
the number of trips employees made
to fill a small plate) and help them
reduce their calorie intake. I have
seen such experiments to control
wastage of food during lunch breaks.
At one manufacturing firm, the HR
Department set up a Scoreboard to
show how many kilos of food was
wasted the day before and so on.
Obviously, such loud displays helped
control the menace to an extent. At
another place, a young engineer
decided to stick graphic photos of
poor children dying of hunger right
next to the serving area.

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43

TECHNOLOGY
Consequently, people got the
message and while some folks
attributed their loss of appetite to
the pictures some said it made them
more sensitive about the quantity of
food they loaded on their plates.
Unlike the operational experiments
Google undertook, the examples I
cite may not have been the result of
any meticulous planning, rigorous
measurement or even continuous
experimentation. At the same time,
I cannot help but point out that HR
is expected to change employee
behaviour in numerous ways for a
variety of reasons. That, to say the
least, is exactly what HR is expected
to do (if we hear our line managers
correctly). Therefore, if earlier, HR
did not have the tools to study,
analyze and mould employee
behaviour, thanks to Big Data
Analytics it now has a wide and
bewildering array of tools that have

Sumeet Varghese

the potential to predict and regulate

employee behaviour, on a mass scale.
While most of the examples here
pertain to food, I am hopeful that
Operational Experiments in HR will
extend to other more promising
areas of employee experience as well.
I remember the case of a "desi" (no
HR Degree / no Strategic HR
Experience) HR Head who was asked
to hire a Costing Manager. The
company he works for has a lone
manufacturing unit outside Delhi.
Once the Costing Manager was on
board, the company realized he had
no job since he needed data on work
in progress - timely data on finished
and unfinished goods and inventory,
almost on a daily basis. As the
company did not have an MIS or
any practice of tracking anything
remotely called " operational and
production data", the HR Head
secured permission from the MD to
circulate chits of paper to collect
such data from the company's 300
odd employees (all semi-skilled) at
the end of each working day. In
exchange for 10 rupees every day,
each employee was asked to
accurately mention on the chit the
quantum of stock they were sitting
on. The scheme went down well with
the workers and the Costing Manager
discovered he had enough and more
data to occupy himself for a full year.
The MD was so pleased that he
decided to increase the amount to
Rs 20 per day. If a desi MIS can be
generated on the fly through an
operational experiment, I am sure
HR can conduct many experiments
to help businesses unlock value from
Data.

Founding Partner, Your HR Buddy

In a career spanning 15+ years,
Sumeet Varghese has had various
avatars - initially serving as Country
Manager for the Human Capital
Institute an HR Think-tank, and
later, as Associate Director at T.V. Rao
Learning Systems Pvt. Ltd., before
founding Your HR Buddy. He has
consulted more than 100 firms (in
India, the Middle East and South East
Asia), trained over 1000 executives
(including MDs and CEOs) and
published over 75 position papers
covering key areas of HR and OD
practice.

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August 2015

C. Dashboards

and

visualization
For HR Departments that continue
to labour with PowerPoint and XL,
software like Tableau and Sisense can
appear to be the proverbial oasis in
a desert formed by data. They can
make data analytics visually stunning
and beautiful and for a change, even
make business leaders fall in love
with HR. However, these are low
hanging fruits on a long journey. The
primary objective of an HR Analytics
Department cannot be the creation

and transmission of Dashboards and

Data Visualization - although these
can greatly help Line Managers to
arrive at their own inferences and
conclusions, especially where they
doubt HR to offer some stellar
insights.

D. HR metrics
Dashboards are made up of various
kinds of metrics. Thanks to the
"proliferate or perish" treaty that HR
Professionals became signatories to
sometime in the past decade, various
types of HR Metrics (in the order of
1000s) are available today with
leading ERP vendors. Someone
recently claimed they have
developed 3000+ HR metrics to track
- now that's taking this proliferation
business a bit too far. Unfortunately
businesses don't share HR's love of
metrics. Moreover, what irks them
the most are the totally different
ways in which teams within the same
organization measure the same
metric? Recruitment alone throws up
various ways to measure an
important metric like "time to hire"
depending on how exactly you
identify the base line. Worried
probably by the confusing signals the
HR fraternity was sending out to the
business community, SHRM
instituted standard ways of measuring
some common metrics like Cost of
Hire and so on. However, I really
wonder how these standards can be
applied across geographies or even
industries.

Skill-sets HR professionals of
the future will need
If Big Data Analytics is taken to its
logical conclusion by "illogical",
departments (Whether, they be IT
or Operations or even HR), HR
professionals won't be around and
the best part, HR skills won't be
required. I and a senior friend
facilitated a workshop recently for a
group of finance professionals.
Everything from our travel and stay
onwards to getting the participants
to the venue from various regions
was seamlessly managed by the
Finance team. We were personally
shocked (truth be told, we had mixed
feelings and didn't know whether to

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TECHNOLOGY
laugh or cry) to not find a single HR
professional play a role anywhere
from need identification to vendor
shortlisting and screening to trainee
coordination to venue booking to
feedback collection. When we left,
the chaps said they have more work
lined up for us - just that we would
have to re-title the entire intervention
to avoid detection by the company's
HR Department and to prevent
generating the impression that
Finance is stepping into HR territory.
Already, many traditional HR
processes (requiring what was

wee bit statistical, certainly

programming friendly as well as a
domain expert having a more
integrated view of HR.

traditionally termed "HR skill-sets")

are either being outsourced or
perhaps (in the case I recounted)
taken over by line functions. Now if
the rest (which is not much - though
some serious-minded folks might
give it some meat and call it
"strategy" or "business partnering"
or "talent management") is to be
carefully considered, automation will
slowly
catch
up.
Google's
recruitment algorithms have done
away with the need to have a hiring
manager for some positions. At the
same time its retention algorithms
help it to predict who is likely to
leave. While I do not immediately
foresee job-destroying algorithms to
entirely replace a generation of HR
professionals, I am hoping a new
breed of HR professionals with
algorithm-dismissing/refining skills
will be able to find their feet in the
Big Data landscape. It is quite
possible, that the HR professional of
the future will be more analytical; a

at a firm (contrary to what we HR

professionals think). This is the
human version of Big Data Analytics
at work, perhaps! From among the
few that I have been able to identify,
I find the one involving a senior
finance manager at a large Indian
firm, quite interesting. This
gentleman hires juniors who meet
one criterion: they should have
cleared their CA (Chartered
Accountancy qualifying exams) in
the 3rd or 4th attempt. The way he
sees it, such candidates are ready to
stretch more than those who have
cleared it in the first attempt. Now,
anyone who has taken the exam
thrice will confess that the pain of
preparing for the exam three times
over and clearing it can be
excruciating indeed. Whether that
preparation makes them more
industrious and persevering (at least,
in the eyes of this finance
professional) is a matter of debate
for statisticians and behaviourists

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Common "heuristics" line

managers are known to
use for hiring/firing
Across organizations of all types, you
will bump across various types of
people heuristics (unexamined
People Models) at work - rules of
thumb that may have served line
managers well and which play a very
large role in several people decisions

alike. While there is no independent

study out there that can establish
whether these three-timers are more
persevering and industrious than the
first-timers, our finance manager
continues to operate on the basis of
this heuristic and what is more, over
time, has been able to build and
retain a team of productive
professionals using the same logic.
Every people heuristic is a fit
subject of research for a budding
HR Analytics professional. Armed
with statistical tools, behavioural
analysis
models
and
an
understanding of how people form
perceptions about groups and
individuals, an HR Analytics
Department should statistically
examine those "notions" or
"assumptions" about people that
might be actually preventing
organizations from attracting, hiring,
promoting and retaining talented
people.
One gentleman at a leading
telecom company confessed using a
particular heuristic to screen out
candidates: he would ask the
candidate to share his/her contact
numbers during the interview. If the
candidate used the services of a rival
telecom operator (as would be
evident from the number he/she
provided), he/she would be
dismissed from the interview. My
friend's logic (based obviously on
years of experience - Big Data
Analytics) for the summary rejection
is based on the idea that such
individuals are never loyal to the
brands they work for. If they were,
they would avail their company's
services and not that of a rival. In his
scheme of things, people lied but
the numbers didn't. If our Big Data
Analytics program operates on a
similar premise: people lie but
numbers don't, we risk repeating the
same mistake that my friend from
the telecom sector makes. You see my friend never asks where the
candidate
lives
and
more
importantly, whether this place has
adequate network coverage or not
or whether the area in which the
candidate usually operates has a good
number of telecom towers for his
customers or not.
HC

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