Tag: organizationalsilos

How People Analytics Can Help You Change Process, Culture, and Strategy

It seems like every business is struggling with the concept of transformation. Large incumbents are trying to keep pace with digital upstarts., and even digital native companies born as disruptors know that they need to transform. Take Uber: at only eight years old, it’s already upended the business model of taxis. Now it’s trying to move from a software platform to a robotics lab to build self-driving cars.

And while the number of initiatives that fall under the umbrella of “transformation” is so broad that it can seem meaningless, this breadth is actually one of the defining characteristic that differentiates transformation from ordinary change. A transformation is a whole portfolio of change initiatives that together form an integrated program.

And so a transformation is a system of systems, all made up of the most complex system of all — people. For this reason, organizational transformation is uniquely suited to the analysis, prediction, and experimental research approach of the people analytics field.

People analytics — defined as the use of data about human behavior, relationships and traits to make business decisions — helps to replace decision making based on anecdotal experience, hierarchy and risk avoidance with higher-quality decisions based on data analysis, prediction, and experimental research. In working with several dozen Fortune 500 companies with Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics division, we’ve observed companies using people analytics in three main ways to help understand and drive their transformation efforts.

In core functional or process transformation initiatives — which are often driven by digitization — we’ve seen examples of people analytics being used to measure activities and find embedded expertise. In one example, a people analytics team at a global CPG company was enlisted to help optimize a financial process that took place monthly in every country subsidiary around the world. The diversity of local accounting rules precluded perfect standardization, and the geographic dispersion of the teams made it hard for the transformation group to gather information the way they normally would — in conversation.

In core functional or process transformation initiatives — which are often driven by digitization — we’ve seen examples of people analytics being used to measure activities and find embedded expertise. In one example, a people analytics team at a global CPG company was enlisted to help optimize a financial process that took place monthly in every country subsidiary around the world. The diversity of local accounting rules precluded perfect standardization, and the geographic dispersion of the teams made it hard for the transformation group to gather information the way they normally would — in conversation.

So instead of starting with discovery conversations, people analytics data was used to baseline the time spent on the process in every country, and to map the networks of the people involved. They discovered that one country was 16% percent more efficient than the average of the rest of the countries: they got the same results in 71 fewer person-hours per month and with 40 fewer people involved each month.

The people analytics team was surprised — as was finance team in that country, which had no reason to benchmark themselves against other countries and had no idea that they were such a bright spot. The transformation office approached the country finance leaders with their findings and made them partners in process improvement for the rest of the subsidiaries.

It’s unlikely the CPG company would have been able to recognize and replicate these bright spots if they had undertaken transformation with a top-down approach. And, perhaps more importantly, it involved and engaged the people on the ground who had unwittingly discovered a better way of doing things.

In bottoms-up cultural transformation initiatives, the how things are done is equally or more important than what is done. Feedback loops and other methods of data-driven storytelling are our favorite way that people analytics makes culture transformation happen. Often times, facts can change the conversation from tired head-nodding to curiosity. One people analytics team in an engineering company was struggling to help develop the company’s managers, for example. Managers often perpetuated a “sink or swim” culture that didn’t fit the company’s aspirations to be an inclusive, humane workplace.

The data analysis found that teams whose managers spent at least 16 minutes of one-on-one time with each direct per week had 30% percent more engaged direct reports than the average manager, who spent just 9 minutes per week with directs. When they brought that data-driven story to the front lines, suddenly a platitude was transformed into a useful benchmark that got the attention of managers. In this way, data storytelling is a lightweight way to build trust among stakeholders and bring behavioral science to culture transformation.

Top-down strategic transformation is often made necessary by market and technology factors outside the company, but here people analytics is a critical factor for execution. A people analytics team can serve as an instrument panel of sorts to track resources, boundaries, capacity, time use, networks, skill sets, performance, and mindsets that can help pinpoint where change is possible and can measure what happens when you try it.

One people analytics team at a financial services company was trying to help the CEO manage growth while he worked to instill a new culture in which departments would be asked to run leaner and more competitive in the market – “scrappy” and “hungry” were terms that often came up. As the transformation accelerated, teams were asked to do more with less, generate more data, and make decisions faster. Amid this, department leaders began to hear anecdotes about burnout and change fatigue and questioned whether the pace was sustainable.

To address this, the people analytics team provided their CEO with a dashboard showing the number of hours that knowledge workers were active for in different teams. When an entire team is over-utilized, he knows they can’t handle more change, while under- or unevenly utilized teams might be more receptive. He can also slice the dashboard by tenure, to learn whether recent hires have been effectively onboarded before approving new hire requests to absorb extra work.

As organizations increasingly look to data to help them in their transformation efforts, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t just mean having more data or better charts. It’s about mastering the organizational muscle of using data to make better decisions; to hypothesize, experiment, measure and adapt. It’s not easy. But through careful collection and analysis of the right data, a major transformation can be a little less daunting – and hopefully a little more successful.

By: Chantrelle Nielsen & Natalie McCullough

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Lessons From The Pandemic On How To Break Down Organizational Silos And Optimize Workforce Potential

COVID-19 has impacted global organizations and their workforces in profound ways. Seemingly overnight, changes in supply and demand for products and services have significantly affected workforce strategies. At the same time, organizations have made necessary but challenging shifts to fully remote working. These and other pandemic-related shifts have forced leaders to challenge their assumptions about work, workforce and workplace and to create new solutions that break down silos to tap into the full power and potential of their existing workforces.

MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte’s 2020 Future of the Workforce Global Executive Study found that prior to the pandemic, only 34% of surveyed workers were satisfied with their organization’s investment in their skills development. Our research suggests that the organizations with the most effective approaches to skills development consistently found ways to provide greater access to and transparency into opportunity for their workforce.

In other words, to engage workers where their skills are needed most, organizations should invest in talent “opportunity marketplaces.”Building on the idea of a traditional marketplace where individuals come to buy and sell goods or services, the goal of a talent opportunity marketplace is to match worker skills to available work. From a workforce perspective, that means giving talent access to new internal opportunities that contribute to their personal growth and development.

From a manager and organizational perspective, that means moving talent where you need it, when you need it, for greater organizational agility. The pandemic has been a wake-up call for many organizations on why this type of ongoing investment is so important to avoid getting caught flat-footed in the future.

At a time when traditional workplace structures are seeing profound change, opportunity marketplaces have been a useful tool for global businesses to align workforces with enterprise and digital strategies, to change organizational behaviors, and to gain meaningful workforce intelligence.

For example, during the pandemic, a health care organization with a network of hospitals around the US was able to use its talent marketplace to shift local capacity to a cross-system staffing network in order to centrally manage staffing as talent needs shifted dramatically across the health system and to different locations/regions.

Opportunity marketplaces provide a platform to think about work beyond the confines of an individual’s role and match workers with internal opportunities for project work on top of their current role or new roles all together, accelerating redeployment processes to get people aligned with work where the organization is seeing strategic demands and to add a human-centered approach to using existing workforce skills from areas of the business that may not be seeing as much demand. During the pandemic, organizations that deploy opportunity marketplaces have been able to stand up call centers, shift supply chains, and assemble emergency response teams, all while tapping into existing talent – effectively breaking down individual, team, business line, and location boundaries.

Opportunity marketplaces, by design, enable greater autonomy for workers and transparency into talent processes, which allows workers more equal access to different types of work, new teams, new leaders, and new locations. These marketplaces can have multiple benefits for organizations beyond the pandemic, including:

  • At the individual level, work doesn’t have to be confined to a role and traditional working hours. Opportunities found on the marketplace can be shorter-term or one-off projects outside the confines of a traditional role, allowing workers to take on projects that can be done alongside their current roles with a focus on outcomes rather than hours.
  • Workers can bring back new capabilities and skills to their teams by working on projects outside of their traditional roles. These can be “hard” skills, such as computer science or data analysis, as well as “soft” skills like communications or problem solving, allowing organizations to increase hidden productivity within the workforce. As organizations work through their human and machine teaming strategies, building up enduring capabilities for human workers will be increasingly important.
  • In terms of increasing inclusion within leadership roles or in succession planning, opportunity marketplaces can be used by organizations to identify rising talent based solely on their skills rather than their relationships or personal network.
  • For organizations that are planning to use a remote working model for the near and longer terms (as we’ve recently seen with many of the world’s largest technology companies), opportunity marketplaces can extend talent supply matching opportunity to demand across global locations.

The pandemic has given leaders a peek into the potential that opportunity marketplaces present for talent management, career mobility, and the future of work. By fully embracing opportunity marketplaces now, these leaders can build up their organizations’ resiliency for future disruptive events while keeping their workers happy.

Steve Hatfield

Steve Hatfield

Steve Hatfield is a Principal with Deloitte Consulting and serves as the Global Leader for Future of Work for Deloitte. He has over 20 years of experience advising global organizations on issues of strategy, innovation, organization, people, culture, and change. This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message and any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, by you is strictly prohibited. Deloitte refers to a Deloitte member firm, one of its related entities, or Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”). Each Deloitte member firm is a separate legal entity and a member of DTTL. DTTL does not provide services to clients. Please see http://www.deloitte.com/about to learn more.

To learn more about

Resro.OPT, go to https://resro.com/resroopt-01 It’s based on Advanced Effort Management (AEM) https://resro.com/advanced-effort-mgt-03 And the Effort Management Theorem https://resro.com/effort-mgt-theorem-03 Developed by RESRODEL http://www.resrodel.com

– 40% of workplace stress is due to workload + 1 in 4 workers feel burnout most of the time. – more than 25% of the reasons projects fail is due to poor workforce management – 10 -15% of world’s GDP is lost from poor workplace wellbeing and health! Resro.OPT compares the potential of Workforce Planning with the intent Workforce Allocation.

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