These Questions Will Determine the Fate of Your Organization

Here is a series of questions I believe to be of strategic importance to every CEO and Chief Human Resource Officer. These should be the Magna Carta of your People Analytics team (if you have one).

Jot down how many of these questions you can answer objectively in a way that can be compared, trended and correlated?

Managers

Can you objectively rank the company's best and worst managers on some standardized criteria?

• Per manager, what are specific comparable strengths and weaknesses on factors within some consistent comparable model of managerial responsibility?
• Per manager, what one behavioral advice could improve their overall ranking? (if they took it)
• Per manager, do you know if they followed up and took the advice or not?
• After the manager has tried that one thing, do you have a measurement system to both confirm the result and give them their next piece of advice?

Productivity Factors

What percentage of the organization knows and agrees to the top 3 company objectives to get where you are trying to get as an organization over the next 5 years?

(Can you rank depts, orgs and teams on this criteria?)

What percentage of the organization knows and agrees to the top 3 team objectives that relate to where their team is trying to get to now?

(Can you rank depts, orgs and teams on this criteria?)

What percentage of the teams in the organization have a majority of members say the team has all the capabilities they need now to deliver maximum possible results on key team objectives?

(Can you rank depts, orgs and teams on this criteria?)

What percentage of employees would say they have all the support they need to achieve the maximum results on their personal key objectives?

(Can you rank depts, orgs and teams on this criteria?)

What percentages of employees are inspired and highly motivated for their work?

(Can you rank depts, orgs and teams on this criteria?)

What is the interacting effects of different combinations of the above on performance by individual or team?

(To clarify - I am not asserting these are measures of productivity. These are factors that should be measured that create an environment conducive for productivity or that confound it. Clearly, every business unit will have its own measures of productivity that it runs around. I am suggesting these factors can be used to understand, predict and provide a tool for management to enhance productivity, which otherwise may escape view.)

Exit Factors (For key roles for your business. And yes, these may vary by role)

Given a set of characteristics related to role, tenure, location, team, pay and other attributes can you group employees likelihood to exit the company in the next year?

(Can you objectively test whether the grouping logic is right?)

What are the top 3 controllable factors you can use to reduce exit risk in the next 12 month time period?

(Can you objectively test whether any specific actions worked?)

Attraction Factors (For key roles for your business. And yes, these may vary by role)

What pre-hire source and candidate attributes are yielding the best results in our hiring process currently?

What pre-hire source and candidate attributes do you want to yield better results in our hiring process?

What factors (methods, messages, team and organizational attributes, etc.) will increase your likelihood to get people into your hiring pipeline from the most desirable sources?

What factors (methods, messages, team organizational attributes, etc.) will increase your likelihood to close job offers from the most desirable sources?

People Networks

Who are the people most admired by their peers in the organization or otherwise are key influencers either related or unrelated to org chart position?

Why are the unique attributes of the most admired people vs those who are not?

How do the internal network scale and shape vary between diverse people?

Talent Management and Total Rewards

Is the organization differentiating enough in total rewards between key jobs and others to see some objective measurable outcome in the roles that you need to win in your market?

(ex. you should see stark differences in attrition rate and/or survey measures between key jobs and others)

Is the organization differentiating enough in total rewards between people with key capabilities or performance attributes to see some objective measure outcome?

(ex. you should see stark differences in attrition rate and/or survey measure between these key people segments)?

If there are competing ideas on the executive team about how to measure and incentivize performance, do you know how you would objectively tell which method works better?

Do you have objective evidence that investments in employee programs and benefits are having a measurable impact on anything?

(How do you know if that is staying the same, increasing or decreasing over time?)

Do you have objective evidence that the program you are getting ready to roll out to the entire company will have the measurable impact you intend before you roll it out to the whole company?

Proprietary Insight

What is the business's unique and differentiating people equation (an actual statistical model) that fits its unique business model and position in the market?

Shoot Me A Note

I'm curious. How many did you get? What key concepts have I missed? What barriers have you have experienced?

If I told you I can provide an example of most of these would you have interest to hear those stories? Would you come out to a meetup group centered on this topic?

Alternatively, if not, would you spend 15 minutes with me to talk about it? For real, shoot me a note. If I get enough interaction on this I am happy to do the work to re-publish with revisions and provide a summary for everyone.

AS ALWAYS, I WISH YOU WELL AND TO HAVE SUCCESS!

Please let me know if there is any way I can improve my writing.

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Who The Hell is Mike West? (Fair Question)

I spent years wandering the desert of my life before deciding the cultivation of People Analytics is my singular focus, unique contribution and reason for being and things have been rosey since then. The ancients say a guy named Jonah had a similar experience.

I was a founding member of People Analytics at Merck, PetSmart, Google, Children's Health (Dallas) before opening the world's first People Analytics Design firm in 2014 : PeopleAnalyst. Lately you will find me hanging out in Mountain View at Pure Storage - a big data tech infrastructure company (making super smart all flash storage arrays used by pretty badass companies).

Oh, I am also an advisor of Product Strategy for One Model - the first cloud data warehouse and reporting platform designed specifically for People Analytics.

Connect with me, Mike West, on Linkedin | keep an eye on PeopleAnalyst | and join the People Analytics Community on Linkedin