But professionals from all departments shy away from taking responsibility
Big data is useful for both understanding and engineering workplace culture, businesswoman and author Rahaf Harfoush said in her keynote speech at HR Forum aboard the Arcadia.
Harfoush came to this conclusion while doing research for the book The Decoded Company.
She and her co-authors found several examples of businesses using data to identify and fix culture problems.
Search giant Google was one example highlighted in the book. Harfoush said the employer had run a big data exercise called ‘Project Oxygen’ to discover what made a good manager. The analysis found that staff valued eight traits in their managers. Coaching was the most prized, while, perhaps surprisingly, strong technical skills were seen as least important. The employer used these findings to revise recruitment policies and development programmes – prior to this the HR department had been hiring managers based on strong technical competence.
But, despite its benefits, Harfoush was told by various professionals during her research that data was somebody else’s responsibility.
“We’re living in an age today where data has become every single person’s responsibility,” she said. “It is no longer a technology issue. It is no longer simply an IT issue. It has become a leadership issue, it’s a strategic issue and it’s a people issue.”
Getting culture right is especially important for tackling talent shortages, conference delegates heard. Manpower Group’s 2015 Talent Shortage Survey found that 38 per cent of employers worldwide had difficulties filling vacancies, up from 36 per cent in 2014. However, 21 per cent of businesses had taken no action to address these shortages.
“If you have somebody brilliant in your business, you can’t just go to your recruiting department and say: ‘I need ten more of those guys’,” said Harfoush. “And so it comes down to creating a work environment that really attracts these people.”
Harfoush’s research also found data is useful for building targeted learning and development. Not only can data pinpoint when an employee had reached a ‘teachable moment’ – a point in time where somebody needs guidance and is therefore most likely to remember it – it can also be used to customise a programme to meet needs and learning styles.
For example, at American telecoms company Sprint, managers were able to recognise staff who needed specific training and deliver this quickly by analysing average wait times for customers at their call centres.
Since implementing this system, the firm has gone from being ranked as one of the worst for customer service to one which regularly performs well on the American customer satisfaction index.
Authors of The Decoded Company argue that many organisations rely on ‘cumbersome’ and complicated processes, which were designed at a time when collecting data was difficult.
“Thanks to data and thanks to analytics, we have the ability to deliver customised processes to our organisations,” said Harfoush.