Bridging the Gap Between Insights and Action

I continue to be optimistic about the maturity growth of the people analytics function, and there's no lack of articles that predict the continued growth of this function in 2017 and beyond.

Nonetheless, in all this optimism lies a common thread: The volume of analytical insights continues to grow, but this doesn’t necessarily translate to meaningful action. I highlight the word meaningful here, as many analytical insights sometimes do lead to action, but these actions don’t necessarily drive business results. People analytics practitioners love to talk about predictive turnover models, but what decisions are actually being made as a result of these models? What are our feedback mechanisms for ensuring we’re achieving ROI for our analytical work? Lorenzo Canlas and his team at LinkedIn have done a great job of sharing their talent analytics journey and the subsequent ROI, but bridging the gap from insights to analytics is often tough sledding (and this goes beyond just people analytics).

Why is it so hard to move from insights to meaningful action? In my experience, there are a multitude of reasons, some of which I will detail here (in no specific order):

• There’s no alignment between the business strategy and analytics
• The analytics team is missing critical skill sets
• There are cultural obstacles that derail the best of intentions
• There are no feedback mechanisms for understanding the impact of actions

There is no alignment between the business strategy and analytics

There’s an oft-repeated saying “What gets measured, gets managed”. This is typically true, but is often to the detriment of analytics teams. In many cases, what is getting measured isn’t tightly linked to the business strategy, and so there is an unfortunate loop of measuring inconsequential activities, managing these activities, and then asking a year later: why are we measuring this again?

There needs to be a crystal clear linkage between the business strategy, the talent strategy, and the analytics that ultimately inform workforce needs. At Gap, we have combined the talent strategy and workforce analytics function with the understanding that all of our work is in service to executing our business strategy. For example, what capabilities are needed to grow in an increasingly digital-first retail industry? Can we build this capability internally, or do we acquire it externally? Our analytics team can analyze our internal skill sets, determine the feasibility of closing any gaps through an assessment of the effectiveness of our training programs, and formulate a build/buy strategy through our talent strategy. This ensures that our insights not only drive action, but that the action is in service to our over-arching business strategy.

The analytics team is missing critical skill sets

Many companies pride themselves on having people analytics teams filled with data scientists, PhDs, and even software engineers. While this is certainly impressive and can lead to truly impactful results, I’d argue that without “soft” skills, this brainpower is often sorely under-utilized or misdirected. The soft skills can either reside in these technical employees (somewhat rare), or they can be supplemented by “translators” on your team. Critical skills that I believe are necessary to drive action, in addition to the technical expertise, are:

• Storytelling with data: How do you translate your findings into a cohesive story that succinctly frames the problem, packages the results in a simple way, and drives high-impact action?
• Influencing: How do you influence key stakeholders to ensure it drives change? Your analysis won’t always tell a pretty story – after all, status quo is easy, change is hard.
• Consultative approach: Are you asking the right questions up-front? How do you partner with your stakeholders to determine root cause? How do you even identify the right stakeholders?
• Bias for action: Do you keep revisiting the data or do you take action for quick wins?

Often without these skill sets on your team, you will do some amazing analytics, but they’ll be gazed upon from afar without driving business impact.

There are cultural impediments that block or slow down action

This is probably one of the hardest issues to overcome in your quest to go from insight to meaningful action. Company culture can derail the best strategies and drown out game-changing insights. Cultures that are detrimental to action-oriented analytics are typically those that are:

• Overly consensus-driven
• Bureaucratic / hierarchical
• Risk adverse
• Inward-focused
• Siloed

In these cultures, there’s little appetite for opposing views (even if they are supported by data), and often the most frequent behaviors are enabled through historical precedence rather than data (i.e., “this is the way we’ve always done it”). This makes it very difficult to enact change or drive actions unless they support an existing viewpoint. For an analytics team, this is in direct contradiction to a nimble, growth-oriented mindset that empowers data-driven innovation and strategies. Research suggests that changing culture starts with changing behaviors first, so it’s important to find advocates in the organization that exhibit the desired behaviors and to partner with them on analytics projects. Positive results need to be communicated and recognized. While not necessary, it’s often more impactful to have this advocate in a leadership position. Outside of this, a highly networked employee can influence the desired behaviors amongst his or her colleagues quite well.

There are no feedback mechanisms for understanding the impact of actions

The last obstacle from moving from insights to meaningful action is a lack of feedback loops. Often times we provide insights, actions are agreed upon, but there isn’t any mechanism for tracking whether the actions are having an impact. There’s a couple of implications for a lack of feedback loops, including not reinforcing the behaviors for other teams, as well as not being able to quantify the ROI of the analytics team in the first place. Your analytics may be driving actions that directly contribute to business growth, but without a way to track the results, how do you know whether the results are repeatable or scalable in other parts of the organization? It could take just one analytical insight to pay for your team for years on end, but you need to isolate and track the impact of those insights first. This also reinforces a bias for action for future analytical insights, as your colleagues can point to past results and business impact as a result of your analytics. Without communicating and getting feedback on data-driven actions, you will keep providing insights to deaf ears, or even worse, your business partners will thank you for the great insights but do nothing with them.

Final thoughts

In the end, these obstacles for bridging the gap from insight to meaningful action are not insurmountable. And often, you’ll only be facing one or two of these obstacles at a time. There are many ways to drive action, but at the end of the day, you can’t drag people from understanding to action. Your business partners must be willing to take your insights and apply them strategically in a way that is linked to business outcomes. A lot of time and research is dedicated to understanding the barriers of sound data collection, data management, and analysis, but there should be equally as much time spent on understanding how to encourage a bias for action as a result of analytics. Otherwise, insights become an eco-chamber in the confines of your own team and the potential of analytics is lost in a sea of ever-competing priorities.

Note: All opinions are solely my own and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer.