Workforce performance is a problem that is highly important for the managers of any level. How to get the best from your people? How to measure the ROI that you make in your employees, or more exact – how these investments affect workforce performance? Every company is interested to increase performance especially of its top employees that are perhaps greatest asset of the company.
Big companies like Google, BestBuy, Amazon, Starbucks and many others understood the necessity of performing sophisticated analytics to get the picture of the grade and level of contribution of key employees. These companies continuously monitor employees’ efficiency rate by different data in order to elaborate the best stimulation programs for increasing their motivation and ultimately, operational performance of the company.
Companies use analytics to measure people decisions, employees’ profiles and performance history in order to ensure that right people are working in the right jobs. Actually, the methodology comes from customer profiles analytics, when marketing team uses quantitative analysis to select customers with the greatest profit potential and to refine pricing and promotions for targeted segments.
Inside the company, employees are your customers that invest more from their potential, if you do a right segmentation – the most suitable position for the unique qualities and capabilities of your employee. Top-line company revenue and employee engagement are much interconnected and executives should pay a special attention to identify and quantify methods of increasing employee’s engagement.
For example, almost every medium-sized or big company values employee engagement but the most advanced companies can precisely identify the value of 0,1% increase in engagement among employees in particular department. Retailers are especially caring about such values: at BestBuy, for example, that value is more than $100,000 in the store’s annual operating income.
Google established wide use of analytics to improve people retention rate and to develop the best capabilities for them. People working in Google affirm that there are three reasons they stay in Google: the mission, the quality of the people, and the chance to build the skill set of a better leader or entrepreneur. All Google’s analytics is built around these reasons.
Human values build digital values that improve human values. Google started from identifying leading people people-management practices and confirm them with data and analysis. For this purpose, people analytics function was created with its own director and a staff of 30 researches, analysts and consultants who study employee-related decisions and issues.
As a result People and Innovation Lab (PiLab) determined what backgrounds and capabilities are associated with high performance and what factors are likely to lead to attrition. It has set the ideal number of recruiting interviews at five, down from a previous average of ten.
Good management keeps the company alive. Google established a special matrix calling it “Google’s Project Oxygen” that determines the attributes of successful managers. For this scope annual employee surveys are regularly studied, performance management scores are executed, as well as other data applied to divide managers into four groups according to their quality.
Following that stage, in order to determine the managerial practices high-and low-scoring managers were interviewed double-blind: neither interviewers nor managers knew which category the managers were in. Finally, Google was eventually able to identify eight behaviors that characterized good managers and five behaviors that all managers should avoid.
Read continuation [this link directs to Part II]
