40 People Analytics Case Studies - Part 2
40 People Analytics Case Studies - Part 2

40 People Analytics Case Studies - Part 2

Last time in Part 1, I compiled ten people analytics case studies from the likes of Google, Cisco, Shell, Nielsen and Microsoft. Ten more stories follow here, with Part 3 and Part 4 each featuring ten more case studies following in the next few days. Collectively, they should provide a combination of learning and inspiration to those looking to embark on their own journeys in this burgeoning area of HR. 

Here's this week's ten...

LinkedIn

One of the most impressive stories I’ve heard in the last year comes from LinkedIn. Lorenzo Canlas, who used to head up the team, wrote an excellent article describing ‘How we built Talent Analytics at LinkedIn’, which outlines their journey (read in tandem with the Slideshare below by William Gaker). A specific example of the power of analytics came from Rebecca White at the People Analytics & Future of Work Conference in San Francisco earlier this year. Rebecca explained how LinkedIn had used analytics to improve its identification and prioritisation of critical talent for hiring engineers. The analytics team worked with product and talent acquisition to create a four-box prioritisation model that proved so successful in its nine-month pilot that an adapted version was included as part of a future release of LinkedIn Recruiter.

 

ABN AMRO

Another hugely impressive story comes from Dutch bank ABN AMRO and their Head of HR Analytics, Patrick Coolen – who has deservedly built a reputation as one of the leading people analytics practitioners on the planet. Patrick started the analytics journey at the bank four years ago, and this interview with Luk Smeyers of iNostix, provides an illuminating view on Patrick’s approach and also some of the key decisions he has had to make along the way such as whether to hire data scientists into his own team or work with external partners. Patrick’s LinkedIn blog and the Slideshare below of his presentation at HR Tech World in Paris from 2015 also provide some fascinating insights into how Patrick and the team at ABN AMRO operates.

 

IBM

IBM is widely regarded as one of the leading organisations globally when it comes to people analytics. The company started its journey in 2010, under the leadership of Jonathan Ferrar, and six years later and now under the stewardship of Tom Stachura and Anshul Sheopuri, the Workforce Analytics team has grown to 70+. The successes have been well documented, with continued impetus coming from CHRO Diane Gherson – the epitome of the 21st Century data-driven HR leader. Two articles highlighting Diane’s belief that analytics is central to HR, the business and the employee can be found here in People Matters and Think Leaders. The benefits delivered to the business through the insights of the Workforce Analytics team have been numerous and varied. For example, as Diane indicated in her keynote at the 2016 IBM HR Summit in London, the ability to predict and prevent regrettable attrition has created a net benefit of $270m alone. Another example comes from the employee sentiment analysis IBM conducts on internal and external social media. This allowed the company to identify, consider and reverse a decision to ban the use by its employees of Uber.

IBM CHRO Diane Gherson speaking at the IBM HR Summit in London in June 2016


Coca-Cola Enterprises

Part 1 of this article featured the Microsoft case study from the excellent Valuing Your Talent initiative. Another case study included on the site, is ‘The Thirst for HR Analytics Grows’, which was put together by David Smith and documents Coca Cola Enterprise’s (CCE) five-year journey in setting up a centralised reporting and HR analytics team serving eight countries. It’s a great story, describing as it does how CCE has progressed through the classic Bersin by Deloitte People Analytics Maturity Curve from operating and integrated reporting through to predictive analytics. The Figure below captures perfectly how CCE operationalised reporting and freed up the team to conduct more analytics projects. It’s an uplifting story and one I have seen develop over the years in conference presentations from the likes of David Crumley, the aforementioned David SmithErin Kieley-Roberts and Vanessa Ratcliffe.

The evolution at Coca-Cola Enterprises from ad-hoc reporting to analytics

Walmart

Walmart is the world’s largest privately owned company with 2.2m global employees. It’s people analytics team was created by Elpida Ormanidou in 2009 and now numbers over 70 people with a diverse array of skills, capabilities and backgrounds. As described in this article, the team is organised into four pillars: Modelling & Data Mining, Research & Social Media, Visualisation & Protoype (telling referred to as 'Data Artists' by Soloman Bennett during his keynote at the Workforce Analytics Summit in New York in May 2016) and Test & Learn. As well as turnover (see example here covering Saba Beyene’s session at People Analytics World in London in April 2016), absence, mobility and leadership development there is a strong focus on monitoring customer experience and sales – linking HR data to wider business metrics. 

“People analytics is not just about HR. You can’t be closed-minded in HR – you are trying to improve the business – it has to be open to other parts of the business”
Saba Beyene (pictured above), Senior Director, Global People Analytics at Walmart speaking at People Analytics World in London, April 2016

Salesforce

Salesforce reached $5 billion in annual revenue quicker than any other enterprise software company and is one of the fastest growing companies on the Fortune 500. This means that Ernest Ng and his team have some unique challenges to face with regards to people analytics. In this great podcast with Michael Housman of hiQ Labs recorded in the summer of 2016, Ernest shares some insights around prioritisation and key focus areas particularly with regards to sales. To see more from Ernest you may also want to view the video below, where he and Tim Wesson outline three case studies of how Salesforce uses data, analytics, and culture to disrupt where, who, and how to recruit.

 

JetBlue

Recruiting is arguably the perfect shop window in HR for analytics as not only is hiring great people of utmost importance, but hiring is high-volume, comprised of repeatable processes, and for too long has been primarily based on intuition and unconscious bias. One organisation that has applied analytics in this area is JetBlue. This article ‘Should Hiring be Based on Gut - or Data?’ gives a fascinating insight into how the airline used customer data that being ‘helpful’ was a more important characteristic in its flight attendants than being ‘nice’ - the attribute previously prioritised when selecting new hires. Consequently, JetBlue reengineered its recruitment process and has enjoyed measurable benefits including higher engagement and retention, lower absence and a half-point boost in its Net Promoter Score, which translates to a lot of additional dollars in the airline industry. The first ten minutes of the video below features Andy Biga and Ryan Dullaghan presenting the JetBlue story at the Wharton People Analytics Conference. 

“When one point of NPS means a whole lot of money, tweaking your hiring process can have a huge impact on the rest of the company”
Ryan Dullaghan, Manager, People Assessment & Analytics at JetBlue 

Virgin Media

Getting started with people analytics can be difficult. This is especially so where the HR and the business needs to be educated on what analytics is and the benefits it can bring. That’s what makes this story of how Aggy Dhillon and her small three-person team enabled ‘Virgin Media to Cure High Sickness Rates with Analytics’ so uplifting. Despite high engagement and low attrition, absence levels in call centres averaged 20 days a year. The insights offered enabled absence rates to be reduced from 9% to 4%, saving the business £750,000. A great first step in what will likely prove a fruitful journey.

“The reason we were successful was we had a load of untapped data sources, we had a growing reason for doing the project and when the leadership team saw the data, they believed it”
Aggy Dhillon, Head of People Insight at Virgin Media 

Unilever

When I co-chaired the Tucana People Analytics Conference for the first time in 2015, one of the most impressive stories came from Ben Hawley, who outlined the great work Placid Jover (who has now passed the baton to Nicky Clement), he and the team were doing with HR analytics at Unilever. Two of the key building blocks in enabling Unilever’s success are highlighted on the Valuing Your Talent site. First up is having a clear vision linking people measures with business performance as this case study featuring the now-retired former CHRO Doug Baillie makes crystal clear. Secondly, is this podcast with James Stringer, HRIS & Analytics Director, which describes Unilever’s data journey, which now sees a single HR system in place across 104 countries and also outlines the 78 core HR metrics that Unilever collects about each employee. 

Nestlé

Like Coca-Cola Enterprises, I’ve seen the Nestlé story in the UK & Ireland develop over a number of years as Michael Cox, Katy Bowers, Michael Wilkinson and Jude Fletcher regularly share their progress on the conference circuit. This article in Diginomica describes how the team drilled down to find the specific causes of attrition and the resultant changes that were implemented from the insights of the analysis.

“We’d done our homework and we really understood the data and we’d really analysed things and proved things statistically and it gave us much greater credibility, not just within HR but at business level”
Michael Cox, Head of HR Business Excellence, Technology & Analytics at Nestlé UK & Ireland  

Bonus: Mark Berry (ConAgra Foods / CGB Enterprises)

Lastly as a bonus as it is not really a case study per se, but perhaps something even better. Mark Berry built his reputation in this space by building a people analytics function from scratch at ConAgra Foods. He has since moved on to CGB Enterprises, where he holds the CHRO position (the progression from a Head of People Analytics to a CHRO role is something I believe will be commonplace in the next few years). Mark also writes and speaks with extreme passion and honesty on his experiences, and this article – How to fail at HR Analytics: Lessons from a Leading Loser – is a must-read for anyone working in or aspiring to work in a people analytics role. Mark's interview with Luk Smeyers on the iNostix blog is also a mandatory read.

"Talent analytics – rightly executed – is the “GPS” of HR"
Mark Berry, CHRO, CGB Enterprises

Mark Berry speaking at People Analytics World in London in April 2016 

Coming up next...

Hopefully, this has proved a useful read. If so, please note that Parts 3 and 4 will be published over the coming days and you can already read Part 1. I’d also love to hear about your people analytics success stories (or any others not included in this series), so do please provide links etc in the comments section below or contact me directly.

_____________________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David is a respected influencer, writer and speaker on people analytics, data-driven HR and the future of work. He was recognised as Best Writer at the 2015 HR Tech Writers’ Awards, and was awarded one of ten LinkedIn Power Profiles for HR in 2016. David’s role as Global Director, People Analytics Solutions at IBM enables him to help clients apply an analytical, insight led and business outcome focused approach to their talent strategies and people decisions.

David is chairing, speaking and/or attending the following conferences between now and June. If you are going to one of these conferences and would like to meet up with David, please feel free to contact him via LinkedIn:

Connect with David on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter and read his blogs here on LinkedIn and also on HR Tech World and ERE.

Keywords: HR, Human Resources, HR Analytics, People Analytics, Talent, Recruiting, Hiring, Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, HR Metrics, Cost Per Hire, Workforce Analytics, Talent Analytics, Data Driven HR, Employee Engagement, Performance Management, Future of Work, Quality of Hire, Evidence based HR, HR Open Source, #HROS, Cognitive HR, Cognitive Computing, IBM, HR Technology, Flight Risk, Predictive Analytics,

Shelly Shrestha

COO @ coachbetter | MBA @ WHU

7y

David Green wow! I really enjoyed reading this ! And putting it together in the words of Salesforce and Game of Thrones, we need to brace ourselves, as disruption is coming :) I also think you should check out what Merck is doing with regards to workforce analytics. We have come a long way from only making use of integrated data warehouses to empowering our leaders in making use of the people analytics and telling top people stories, not based on gut feelings but by letting the analytics do the talking! 😊

Like
Reply
Greta Roberts

Recovering Software and Sales Exec.

7y

Excellent post. Loving seeing the business results coming through workforce and HR analytics.

Like
Reply

Thats enough evidence to show that most decisions in HR today can be better if they are based on data (HR analytics) rather than just making decisions from the gut.

Like
Reply

Thanks hey thats great work indeed. So informative and educative

Like
Reply
Skye Trubov

Head of Talent Management at ASOS.com

7y

Thanks for sharing - great insight!

Like
Reply

To view or add a comment, sign in

Insights from the community

Explore topics