If you were asked to lead a conversation around the best ways to use data to generate actionable insights in your organization, what would be the most impactful themes to explore? Here are the critical questions that are at the core of key articles in this issue.
Building a Data-Driven Culture Health Index
- How can you provide a data-driven dashboard on the health of your company’s culture to show to your board and leadership team the degree to which it is aligned with your strategy, risk and performance goals?
- What are your cultural priorities, and are they measurable?
- How do you ensure that culture is an asset and not a liability?
- If you were to build a culture health index of your own, how would you ensure that the entire leadership team is on board, so they don’t become defensive if the data reveals weaknesses in a particular area of the business?
- Fast-forward to a time when regulators might scrutinize culture data as closely as they do financial data. What verifiable and consistently reported information would you be able to share with both external and internal audiences and stakeholders?
"People provide so much data that directors are overwhelmed and don’t know what to focus on. There are probably only three to five data points that really matter in a set of 100 data points."
—Shanti Atkins
In First Person: Prasad Setty
- Given the heightened focus on retention, what aspects of your employees’ compensation package is most meaningful to them? If you were to invest additional money to make their package more attractive, what aspect would deliver the greatest ROI?
- What decisions could ideally be made by an algorithm to save time and energy?
- Which ones require more direct engagement by managers (especially if they are asked to justify their decisions)?
- How can analytics be used to improve HR practices across the “four Es”: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Experience and Equity?
- How is information flowing in your organization? Does everyone have what they need to get their jobs done?
"I don’t think we will ever get to a place where we can take away human judgment and decision-making—both for the sake of accountability (someone needs to own the decisions) and because there are factors that we will need to rely on human judgment for. "
—Prasad Setty, Google
Improving Diversity with Data
- How do you strike the balance between the art and science of data?
- How do you investigate what the data you are capturing is not telling you?
- Is the data you are sharing with the board and leadership team about what is happening, or does it dig deeper to explain the why and how we can fix it?
- Does your diversity data provide a full picture by tracking inflow of talent, their development and their exits?
“If we’re ever to truly live up to our promise to build more inclusive companies on this planet, we need every bit of data we can get. ”
—Ernest W. Marshall, Eaton