10 Trends in Workforce Analytics (英文)
Workforce analytics is developing and maturing. These are the 10 major trends for the near future.
1. From one time to real-time
Many workforce analytics efforts start as a consultancy project. A question is formulated (“How do our employees experience their journey?”), many people are interviewed, data is gathered, and with the help of the external consultants a nice report is written and many follow up projects to redesign the employee journey are defined.
A one-time effort is nice, but it might be more beneficial to develop ways to gather more regularly and maybe even real-time feedback from candidates, employees and other relevant groups.
The survey practice is changing. We see organizations using several approaches:
The classic annual or bi-annual employee survey, for a deep dive.
Weekly, monthly or quarterly pulse surveys to gather more frequent feedback. A few questions, often varying the questions per cycle. Some more advanced pulse survey solutions are adaptive: they ask more questions to people when they sense there are issues (“How was your week?”. If the answer is “Very Good”, the survey is finished, if you answer, “Not so good”, there are some follow-up questions). Pulse surveys can also be easily connected to the important “moments that matter” for the employee experience.
Continuous real-time mood measurement. Innovative solutions in this area are still scarce, especially if you want to measure in a passive non-obtrusive way. Keencorp is an example, they analyze aggregated e-mails and can report on the mood (and risks) in different parts of an organization.
In my article Employee mood measurement trends, you can find an extensive overview of mood measurement providers.
2. From people analytics to workforce analytics
Currently, the general opinion seems to be that people analytics is a better label than HR analytics.
Increasingly the workforce is consisting of more than just people. Robots and chatbots are entering the workforce. The first legal discussions have started: who is responsible for the acts of the robots?
If we’re also analyzing robots, we’re moving from people analytics towards workforce analytics. Robot wellbeing and robot productivity is a nice domain for HR to claim.
3. More transparency
This overview of workforce analytics trends cannot be complete without a reference to GDPR. GDPR is fueling a lot of positive developments, one of them being a lot more transparency. About what kind of data is collected, how it is used, and how algorithms are used to make decisions about people.
The issue of data ownership is related. It is expected that employees will no longer accept that they cannot own their own personal data. Employees need to have the possibility to show their data to their potential next employer as evidence for their productivity and engagement.
4. More focus on productivity
In the last years, there has not been a lot of focus on productivity. We see a slow change at the horizon.
Traditionally, capacity problems have been solved by recruiting new people. This has led to several problems. I have seen this several times in fast growing scale-ups.
As the growth is limited by the ability the find new people, the selection criteria are (often unconsciously) lowered, as many people are needed fast. These new people are not as productive as the existing crew. Because you have more people, you need more managers. Lower quality people and more managers lowers productivity.
Another approach is, to focus more on increasing the productivity of the existing employees, instead of hiring additional staff, and on improving the selection criteria.
Using workforce analytics, you can try to find the characteristics of top performing people and teams, and the conditions that facilitate top performance.
These findings can be used to increase productivity and to select candidates that have the characteristics of top performers. When productivity increases, you need less people to deliver the same results.
A related read on this topic are the 3 reasons to stop counting heads.
5. What is in it for me?
A lack of trust can influence many workforce analytics efforts. If the focus is primarily on efficiency and control, employees will doubt if there are any benefits for them.
Overall there is a shift to more employee-centric organizations, although sometimes you can doubt how genuine the efforts are to improve the employee experience.
Asking the question: “How will the employees benefit from this effort?” is a good starting point for most workforce analytics projects. It also helps to create buy-in, which becomes increasingly important with the introduction of the GPDR.
6. From individuals to teams to networks
Many workforce analytics projects today are still focused on individuals. What are the characteristics of our top performers? How can we measure the individual employee experience? How can we decrease absenteeism?
Earlier, I gave an overview to what extend current HR practices are focused on teams.
As you can see in the table, most of the practices are still very focused on the individual. Workforce analytics can help to improve the way teams and networks function in and across organizations. The rise of Organizational Network Analysis is one of the promising signs.
7. Cracks in the top-down approach
The tendency to implement changes top-down, is still common.
We like uniformity and standardization. In our central control room, we look at our dashboard, and we know we need to act when the lights are turning from green to orange.
HR finds it difficult to approach issues in a different way. Performance management is a good example. Changing the performance management process is often tackled as an organization-wide issue, and HR needs to find the new uniform solution.
In line with the trend called “the consumerization of HR”, employees are expected to take more initiative. Employees are increasingly tired of waiting for the organization and HR, and want to be more independent of organizational initiatives.
If you want feedback, you can easily organize it yourself, for example with the Slack plug-in Captain Feedback. A simple survey to measure the mood in your team is quickly built with Polly (view: “How to measure the mood in your team with Slack and Polly“). Many employees are already tracking their own fitness with trackers like Fitbit and the Apple Watch.
Many teams primarily use communication tools as WhatsApp and Slack, avoiding the officially approved communication channels. HR might go with the flow, and tap on to the channels used, instead of trying to promote standardized and approved channels.
How can workforce analytics benefit from the data gathered by on their employee’s own devices? If it is clear, what the benefits are for employees to share their data, they might be able to help to enrich the data sets and improve the quality of workforce analytics.
8. Ignoring the learning curve
In their book “Making HR measurement strategic”, Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau presented an often-quoted picture, with the title “Hitting the “Wall” in HR measurement”. The wall was the wall between descriptive and predictive analytics.
There are many more overviews with the people analytics maturity levels. Generally, the highest level is predictive analytics.
Patrick Coolen of ABN AMRO Bank recently mentioned a next level: continuous analytics, and he introduced a second wall, the wall between predictive analytics and continuous analytics.
As predictive analytics seems to be the holy grail, many HR teams want to jump immediately to this level. Let’s skip operational reporting, advanced reporting and strategic analytics. We can leapfrog, ignore the learning curve, and jump to the highest level in one step.
For many teams, ignoring the learning curve does not seem to be a sensible strategy. Maybe it is better to learn walking before you start running.
9. Give us back our time!
Recently I spoke to HR professionals from big multinationals who were involved in a “Give us back our time” projects.
In their organizations, the assignment to all staff groups was: stop using (meant was: wasting) more and more time of the employees and managers, please give us some time back!
An example that was mentioned concerned performance management. In this organization, they calculated that all the work around the performance management process for one employee costed manager and employee around 10 hours (preparation, two formal meetings per year, completing the online forms, meeting with HR to review the results etc.).
By simplifying the process (no mandatory meetings, no forms, no review meetings, just one annual rating to be submitted per employee by the manager), HR could give back many hours to the organization – to the relief of both managers and employees.
Big HR systems generally promise a lot. But before the system can live up to the high expectations, a lot of work needs to be done. Data fields must be defined. Global processes must be standardized. Heritage systems must be dismantled.
This results in a lot of work (and agony), for employees, for managers, for HR and for the implementation partners (who do not mind).
Workforce analytics can help a lot in the “give-us-time-back” projects, for example by some simple time-measurement. Measure the time a sample of managers, employees, and HR professionals spend on different activities, and estimate the value these activities optimizes the core activities of the organization (e.g. serving clients and bringing in new clients).
10. Too high expectations
The expectations of workforce analytics are often too high. Two elements must be considered.
In the first place, human behavior is not so easy to predict, even if you have access to loads of people data.
Even in domains where good performance is very well defined and where a lot of data is gathered inside and outside the field, as for example in football, it is very difficult to predict the future success of young players.
Secondly, the question is to what extend managers, employees and HR professionals behave in a rational way. All humans are prone to cognitive biases, that influence the way they interpret the outcomes of workforce analytics projects. Some interesting articles on this subject are why psychological knowledge is essential to success with people analytics, by Morten Kamp Andersen, and The psychology of people analytics, written by myself.
A more general thought: what if you replaced ‘Workforce analytics’ with ‘Science’? What is the role of science in HR? The puzzle is, that there are many scientific findings that have been available for a long time but that are hardly used in organizations.
Example: it has been proven repeatedly, that the (unstructured) interview is a very poor selection instrument.
But still, most organizations still rely heavily on this instrument (as people tend to overestimate their own capabilities). Why would organizations rely on the outcomes of workforce analytics, when they hardly use scientific findings in the people domain?
An interesting presentation on this topic that I recommend is by Rob Briner, titled evidence-based HR, what is it and is it really happening?
There’s a lot that’s changing in the world of work. These are the 10 trends in workforce analytics that I’m seeing today and that will likely impact the way we work in the near future.
This article is based on a keynote I gave at the Workforce Analytics Forum in Frankfurt, Germany, on April 18, 2018.
by Tom Haak
Tom Haak is the director of the HR Trend Institute The HR (Human Resources) Trend Institute follows, detects and encourages trends. In the people and organization domain and in related areas. Where possible, the institute is also a trend setter. Tom has an extensive experience in HR Management in multinational companies. He worked in senior HR positions at Fugro, Arcadis, Aon, KPMG and Philips Electronics. He holds a master’s degree in Psychology. Tom has a keen interest in innovative HR, HR tech and how organizations can benefit from trend shifts. Twitter: @tomwhaak
未来
2018年06月27日
未来
区块链技术将会彻底颠覆我们下一代的工作环境文| Andy Spence
数字工作平台可以适用于许多不同类型的工作。尽管Uber等灰色经济平台存在一些备受关注和存在争议的问题,但Andy Spence FRSA认为,区块链技术具备一些固有特性,可以帮助我们构建更公平,更有效的、属于下一代的工作平台。
今天在英国出生的婴儿预计平均寿命将超过100岁。他们不可能像我们一样,在18岁时上三年大学,为两三名雇主工作,然后66岁领退休金退休。受到新技术和不断演变的商业模式影响,我们的工作方式正在发生迅速的改变,现在比以往任何时候都有更灵活的就业选择。例如,在RSA进行的一项调查中,估计英国灰色经济的参与者有110万人左右。
The Taylor Review描述了所有能够提高工作质量的“良好工作”目标,同时保留了其灵活性。为了实现这些目标,我们需要改善给合适和乐于工作的员工分配工作的方式。我们招聘不同类型的员工,势必会导致一些问题。这些问题包括偏见和歧视,找不到可靠的工作人员,对集中式社交网络的信任程度低,垃圾邮件和中介机构的高额费用。我们现在有机会构建由技术支持的下一代工作平台,如人工智能,移动端和区块链等技术。
区块链本质上是分布式分类帐,它可以实现安全的点对点加密交易。不需要中央数据库或中介,它保存了不可更改的数字交易记录。除了“加密货币的价格泡沫”的最新头条之外,区块链解决方案也正在建设之中。例如,区块链技术正被开发来记录土地登记处的财产交易,在伊利诺斯州,他们利用区块链技术来登记出生证明以及追踪血钻。
新一代数字工作平台的一些关键特点很有可能对我们的经济带来革命性影响。首先,由个人管理并由独立机构认证的身份验证机制,可能包括了他们的资历,工作历史和其他参考信息。我研究了这种方法如何影响人力资源,并在区块链研究所的帮助下研究了工人在分散式平台上管理已验证的职业情况的潜在好处。the Open University与APPII合作将这一方法放在了区块链的资格和认证上。分散的职业网络平台将允许人们将自己的数据和努力货币化,并立即获得报酬,并使人们能够更好地掌控自己的工作历史。
目前,我们的数据被LinkedIn和Upwork等集中式平台所拥有和货币化。
第二个,员工自有网络和激励
我们可以通过使用数字令牌来奖励和激励用户。
令牌可以用作在社区内运作的实用工具,每个成员在网络中都有股权。激励措施的范围可以从建立面试到同意和雇用人员接触,或者仅仅为了提供相关参考。令牌也可用于民主投票,决定平台的运作方式并推广基于社区的解决方案。这些令牌在长期内也具有内在价值,特别是如果平台被大量人使用的情况下。
第三,通过客户和员工之间的数字智能合同,可以为工人提供更安全,更快速的付款。
这可以减少工资的延迟支付和依赖发薪日的贷款造成的现金流问题。 Etch正在英国建筑业发展试点项目,在完成工作后,承包商能立即得到款项。通过区块链技术话和其他技术的组合,该平台允许工作人员与家人(包括海外)共享工资,汇款收费也会更低。
第四,区块链可以帮助降低交易成本;
据估计,对于许多类型的员工来说,分散的点对点工作平台可以将费用从15-35%降低到5%以下,因为中介机构的参与减少了。
最后,数据工作审计记录将把完成的工作证据记录在防篡改记录中,随着时间的推移,大众对劳动力市场将更加有信心,并有助于防止工作剥削行为,例如非法扣减工资。它还将有助于确保立法合规性,例如“现代奴隶法”。
英国拥有大量对此感兴趣的行业和技术实验室,有条件建成基于区块链技术的下一代工作平台。英国政府对区块链持积极态度,并且我已经举出了许多来自英国的创业公司的例子,这些创业公司引领了就业市场区块链解决方案的开发。例如,在使用区块链技术验证英国学位时,会发出一个关于创新和竞争力的积极信息,并且还会为重要的新技能培养有用的专业知识。
事实上我们不可能准确预测行业将如何发展以及将来需要什么类型的工作。但是,我们有机会使用数字化工作平台推动一项新的社会契约,以建立良好的工作环境,这需要我们进行全方位思考,包括考虑终身学习,教育和税收等。
我正在与技术人员,初创公司和区块链技术的初期倡导者一起构建下一代工作平台;如果下一代能够活到100岁以上,那么我们就可以为他们建立一个更好,更公平的经济环境。
科技企业未来将推崇的工作模式:远程办公编者注:本文作者Luboš是一个环游世界的设计师,同时也是Toptal设计团队的负责人。
远程办公还是一种比较新奇的工作方式,但是据报道称,到2020年,大约50%的技术公司中将会有超过30%的员工使用远程办公,而这个观点乍听上去有些不可思议。但不管是员工还是公司,他们都能从远程办公这一趋势中获益。
1)办公地点自由
远程工作给予了人们选择自己喜欢的工作地点的机会。注意,我指的是任意一个工作地点!只要那里有网络连接,你就可以在任意一个地方办公,甚至是在南极(如果那里有一家星巴克)。在你转移到下一个工作地点之前,你需要考虑以下的因素:
①互联网质量
②服务质量
③犯罪率
④天气
⑤开销
关于以上的因素,我强烈建议你访问Nomad List,在那儿你可以发现所有进行你下一次“探险”所需要的信息。Nomad List上的信息都是由全球的数字化游民直接提供的。(猎云网注:Nomad List是一个互联网工作者城市排名。)
2)开销
但是远程办公最大的优点是什么?可以不穿衣服工作?当然不是!是你可以选择住在生活成本更低的地方。从一个国家获得薪水,而在另一个国家进行消费,这会带来巨大的好处。想象一下你可以拿着旧金山地区的薪水(或者更低一些)并且不需要支付旧金山湾区高昂的租金。你可以根据你的喜好选择任意一个你喜欢的地方,并且可以省下一大笔钱。这笔钱有多少呢?下面这张图可以告诉你答案。
如果你可以进行远程办公,那么你就可以节省下很多钱,因为你的开销会变少。
想想经济稳定可以给你和你的家人带来多少好处。你不用再局限于寻找当地的工作了。赶快行动吧!
3)你会觉得孤单吗?
请记住,远程办公不同于坐在办公室里办公。你身边没有其他人。你不能够和你的同事在咖啡机旁边闲聊。你需要拥有一个成为远程办公者的正确心态(或者你需要培养这种心态),有些时候你可能会觉得孤单。但你还有很多可以联系到其他人或者团队成员的方式,比如说通过meetup、Skype和Slack等等。
最终,你需要成为一个强大的个体来处理好所有的事情。远程办公不一定适合所有人。
4)团队交流
请记住远程团队也可以像其他团队一样工作,甚至在工作过程中会运用类似的工具。我在Toptal公司工作,在没有建立一个办公室的情况下,我见证了这家公司从7名员工发展到100多名员工。整个公司都是进行远程办公,包括工程团队、设计团队、销售团队、用户成长团队等。我们的其中一位联合创始人Breanden在创建公司后,就一直在不停地旅游。你也许觉得这不可思议,但确实没有其他大公司像我们这样运作。
那我们该如何进行团队交流呢?
日程交流和会议工具——Slack和Skype
每周展示—— GoToMeeting
任务管理—— Trello、Jira以及Freshdesk
团队管理——Custom Tools
合作协作——Invision、Trello以及Collabshot
利用上述所有工具,进行适当的时间安排,你可以远程运营一个公司。此外,你还需要记住,如果你要召开会议,请保证会议内容“快、准、狠”,这样所有人能够重新投入各自的工作。要知道,开会不一定就是好的!
5)设计 VS 远程办公
近五年来,我一直进行远程办公。如今,我是Toptal设计团队的负责人。在我的职业生涯中,我发现了一些很有趣的事情。
A)远程办公很难创造出一些令人惊叹的设计产品。
你可以轻易传递98%的正确信息,然而解决剩余2%的小误差却非常困难。这是为什么呢?这是因为有些东西确实很难在网上进行沟通。与身处同一个房间的开发者进行交流和在线与开发者进行交流,这两者之间还是有区别的。相信我这两者绝对不同!
B)这需要花费更多精力。
相比日程工作,你需要在更多细微的方面通知和鼓励员工。从根本上来说,你需要将你的内在精力分享出来给其他人。
C)你需要让传递信息变得更加直观。
当你向团队或者开发者递交反馈时,内容是什么其实无关紧要,你需要保证的是你对反馈内容进行了正确且直观的描述。
5)那么你如何能够远程创建更好的产品呢?
事实上,我们已经发现了一种最有效的方式:首先对产品的创作采用完全远程办公的方式,然后隔一段时间后,让设计团队聚在一起进行头脑风暴、改进每一处小细节、休整并且调动团队的积极性,之后所有人都可以回到各自的办公地点。理想情况下,每3或4个月进行一次会面是比较有效率的。大家在一起的时间不应该超过2周,否则你将失去动力。
这一切都是关于时间安排的问题。你应该根据产品创建的状态来安排团队会面。
6)远程办公的未来
还有一件事让我感到好奇。随着越来越多的公司开始提供远程办公(因为成本、当地缺乏有才华的员工或者其他方面的原因),我很好奇远程办公将会如何影响经济。会有更多的人在一个国家挣钱,却在另一个国家花钱,随着这类人群数量不断上升,这将会影响一些国家的经济。
Remote work is the future!
What they haven’t told you about remote work.
Working remotely is still a relatively new style, but according to reports almost 50% of tech companies will have more than 30% of their workforce operating remotely by 2020, which sounds crazy and awesome all at once. Both employees and companies will gain some huge benefits from this trend.
1) Freedom to choose location
Going remote gives people the opportunity to choose any location they like. And I mean any location. As long as there is a proper internet connection, you can work from every location, even from the South Pole (if there is a Starbucks). Always keep in mind the following factors before moving to your next location.
Quality of Internet
Quality of Services
Criminality
Weather
Costs
For all these things I highly suggest you visit Nomad List, where you can find all the information you need for your next adventure! All information there is curated and directly from digital nomads all over the world.
2) Costs
But what’s the biggest advantage? Being able to work naked? No! It’s that you can choose to live in places with better costs of living. Getting a salary from one country and spending it in another is a huge benefit. Imagine having a San Francisco salary (or even lower) without needing to pay the awfully high rent in the Bay Area. You can choose any location you like based on your preference and save tons of money. How much money? Let’s check out this small example below.
If you’re able to work remotely, you will actually be left with more money because your expenses are way lower.
Think about such the benefits that financial stability would give you and your family. You don’t need to only search for local jobs anymore. Be smart.
3) Do you feel alone?
Keep in mind that remote work is not like working in the office. You simply don’t have anyone around you. You can’t go and chat with someone next to the coffee machine. You need to have the right mindset to be a remote worker (or you will need to develop it), and you sometimes might feel lonely. But there are always options to connect with people and teammates via meetups, Skype, Slack, etc.
At the end of the day, you need to be a really strong individual to be able to handle all of these things. Remote working is not for everyone.
4) Team communication
Keep in mind that remote teams can work like any other team that you’re used to, and even use similar tools in their process. I work at Toptal, which I’ve seen grow from 7 to 100+ employees without ever having an office. The entire company is remote, including the engineering team, design team, sales team, growth team, and more. One of our co-founders, Breanden, has been traveling non-stop since starting the company. You might think that’s crazy, and there really is no other big company doing things like this.
How do we do this?
Daily communication and meetings — Slack and Skype
Weekly Demos — GoToMeeting
Task Management — Trello, Jira, and Freshdesk
Team Management — Custom tools
Design Collaboration — Invision, Trello, Collabshot
With all of these tools and proper scheduling, you can run an entire company remotely. Additionally, keep in mind that if you have meetings, keep them quick and to the point so everyone can get back to their work. Meetings are toxic.
5) Design vs. Remote Working
I’ve been working remotely for almost 5 years, and now leading the design team at Toptal. During my career, I’ve found out a couple of interesting things.
A) It’s harder to deliver awesome products (design-wise) remotely.
It’s easy to deliver things 98% correct, but fixing the 2% worth of tiny differences can be tough. Why? Some things are simply harder to communicate online. There is a difference between iterating based on interactions with a developer who is in the room and one who is online. Trust me there is! :) You simply can’t go and tell them move a certain button 3 pixels up.
B) It consumes a bit more energy.
You need to inform and motivate people way more remotely than in regular work. You basically need to share a lot of your internal energy and give it to other people.
C) You need to get way more visual.
When you deliver feedback to your team or to a developer, it doesn’t matter what it is, you need to make sure that everything is described properly and also has good visualisations.
5) So how do you build better products remotely?
We’ve actually found out the most efficient way to do this: Work fully remotely on the product, then after a period of time travel to one place together to brainstorm, polish every little detail, recharge, and motivate the team, and then everyone can move to a different location again. Ideally you should do this every 3/4 months to be effective, and you shouldn’t be together longer than 2 weeks, otherwise you will lose momentum.
It’s all about timing. You should manage these meetups based on the product state.
6) The future of remote working
There is one more thing I’m curious about. Since way more companies are going to start accommodating remote working (due to costs, lack of local talented employees, and other benefits), I’m curious how much it’s going to affect the economy. Many more people will be earning money in one state and spending all of it in another country, which could affect the economy as the volume of people doing this rises.
Luboš is a Designer traveling all over the world. He is also leading the design team at Toptal. And constantly talking about design.
Source:Medium