The next part in this four-part series, where we introduce you to Lily, our new People and Culture Specialist here at Mo. For part two we share some insight into our hiring process; how we're applying our thinking to talent acquisition; and some practical advice you can adopt when building out your teams.

Welcome back to part two of this four-part series (missed part one?), where we introduce you to Lily, our new People and Culture Specialist here at Mo. For part two we share some insight into our hiring process; how we're applying our thinking to talent acquisition; and some practical advice you can adopt when building out your teams. 

Without further ado, here's Lily for part two.

One of the projects I’ve worked on since joining Mo is perfecting our hiring process. Although we have hired and formed a brilliant team here, the recruitment process has little structure and each hiring manager has taken a different approach. Whilst Mo continues to grow (at an exceptionally fast rate!), it is increasingly important to have a consistent and successful process that everyone can follow. (As a HR professional, I’m all about helping line managers to be successful!)

To form the hiring process, I thought about the things that make a company stand out when applying to work there:

- A solid job description, so you know what they’re looking for and the fit

- Consistent and clear communication, from a rejection after first applying to the final job offer

- A quick turnaround. There’s nothing worse than receiving a rejection from a company that you applied to over a month ago

- A personal touch, so you feel like a real person is talking to you and not a computer 

- Follow ups, so you feel valued at every stage

We want to transform the hiring process and onboarding experience into undeniably brilliant moments that our employees will never forget.

These points might seem like common sense, but they are the basic fundamentals for any company that wants to hire. They are especially important for company that wants to improve people’s relationships with work. 

In fact, a poor hiring process can really affect your brand reputation - a widely known example of this is Virgin. Virgin reportedly lost 6% of their customers after they'd applied to work there and had been rejected in the process. This amounted to a loss of approximately £4.4m, the same amount they had spent on recruitment that year! 

At scale, a poor hiring process can be extremely costly.

Over the last few weeks, we have worked tirelessly on considering every stage of the new hiring process: understanding the requirements of the business; considering the needs of hiring managers; and understanding the view from potential future employees. The process that we have worked to put in place (and follow!) makes sure that every applicant hears back from us, whether successful or not, and feels supported and valued at every stage.

The process also incorporates and celebrates the special moments. For example, we want a candidate to feel proud and excited about coming in for a first interview, and even more excited if we offer them a job! Understanding the key "moments" of the process and how we can double down on these moments has really helped us get to a place that we're confident that we can best support the growth of the business. 

We’re all hoping the hiring process will be a success, and in my next blog, I’ll describe how we’ve been working on the onboarding experience of new recruits. Everybody’s journey with Mo should be amazing, and full of special moments that will allow them to enjoy work more!

Ps – if it’s not obvious, we’re hiring!

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We explore the primary role of marketing in comparison to that of strategic HR, to make the case for more investment in the experience of the employee. It begs the question, is it that we have never thought about the experience of our people in this way or do we not get access to the budget to create meaningful experiences for our people?

For a people tech company CEO I’ve not taken a typical route to get here. I didn’t feel a significant pain as a HR professional nor was I a developer or a product designer. No, instead I have a very commercial background, with my last corporate role in a FTSE 100, leading one of their corporate sales functions.

With a commercial career focussed on sales and customer success, I’ve spoken to thousands of people looking to change something in their organisation, with varying degrees of budget, in both planned and discretionary spend. Much of my career was spent with Commercial, Operational and Finance teams but since starting Mo I’ve been well exposed to the HR world.

The foundation of Mo was driven by a question that wouldn’t stop bugging me. Why do we appear to spend so much more time, money and effort trying to create meaningful experiences for our customers, but put just a fraction of the effort for our people?

So, why do I believe HR deserve budgets like Marketing...

The primary role of marketing is to get people to connect with the company, the brand and its proposition to buy from you, buy more frequently and spend more money with you. Equally, when you think about strategic HR, for me, the primary task is to get people to connect with the company, the brand and it’s proposition (EVP to help make the connection I’m trying to make here).

The overall driver for both functions is to create an emotional connection (as opposed to rational one) with your organisation, so that people give you more. This is the heart of customer and employee engagement.

However, when you look at most marketing and customer focussed teams, there is a tonne of focus on what the customer ‘sees’, ‘hears’ and ‘experiences’ when interacting with your organisation. 

This has led people to crave exceptional experiences and there is no longer an exception at work. So it begs the question, is it that we have never thought about the experience of our people in this way or do we not get access to the budget to create meaningful experiences for our people?

With the emergent job titles of ‘Employee Experience Director', 'Employer Brand Manager' and 'Employee Engagement Leader', I have faith that we are seeing the value of thinking along the lines of the 10 year old service profit chain or the words of Richard Branson:

“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your people, they will take care of your customers”.

The experience is very closely tied to the type of organisation you want to be. EasyJet don’t want to create the Emirates standard of experience, equally Harrods feels very different to Primark. However, people love all of these brands, because the expectation of what you’re getting is clear, the things you do, hear and feel when interacting with them is what you expect, with the occasional moment of delight.

The things that unite the brands mentioned above, is that the standard of service is largely driven by the standard of the interactions with the people serving them. These companies have reasonably high levels of control over the way the brand looks in their advertising, what the physical environment looks like. But how that person, on that day, decides to interact with you, makes all the difference to your experience.

So I like to think of investing in people first as building your brand from the inside, out. If the largest variable in the customer experience (that drives satisfaction, spend and their ultimate return) is that interaction with your employee, why would we not invest more money in creating an exceptional experience for your people. My mum raised me saying: "treat others as you would like to be treated", and it really feels like this is relevant when you think of your people too.

Treat your people, as you would like your customers to be treated.

Marketers, HR leaders, CEOs, if you care about the experience that the customer has, then invest in the experience of your people. 

At Mo, we believe meaningful moments are the heart of an exceptional experience at work. 

When you consider your work life, you will remember it in the moments that mattered, the real highs; a promotion to a job you really wanted, a major project or transformation you delivered or a surprise celebration someone threw when you reached 3 years in your role. Or the moments of insight; some strong but fair feedback that caused you to change the way you act, when something failed that you went on to learn from. 

Moments can be created, elevated and analysed to help create a meaningful relationship with work. Some are spontaneous, some can be designed for, and some are earned. We can help you consider the moments that matter to each of your employees to transform their experience with your organisation.

Tune in to our second podcast. We'll be exploring transformation the impact on people and relationships.

We're pros at this now, here's episode two. We sit down and talk to Burak Koyuncu. Burak is Workforce Solutions Director at Lee Hecht Harrison PennaIt, a consultancy helping businesses through restructuring, changing their culture or developing their leaders. It was a pleasure to have Burak on, we hope you enjoy the episode.

Next up in our podcast, Moments, is Burak Koyuncu. Burak is Workforce Solutions Director at Lee Hecht Harrison PennaIt, a consultancy helping businesses through restructuring, changing their culture or developing their leaders.

Burak is a Strategy Consulting Executive with a PhD in Management and expertise in organisational change, leadership, culture/behaviour change, and talent management. He has a proven track-record of helping organisations with their leadership, people and change strategies during large transformations. He's a thought leader in people and organisation strategy areas with publications in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, among others. Frequently referred to by the business press, including the Business Week, Sunday Times, The Economist, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

It was a pleasure to have Burak on, we hope you enjoy the episode.

With Moments we promise to bring you interviews with people thinking differently about work; insight and evidence that is making a difference to organisations big and small; and practical ways in which you can make a difference in your workplace. 

Please subscribe and let me know what you think of our latest podcast. If you'd like to be involved in any way, have thoughts on who we should speak to next, things that you want us to discuss or ways we can make it better and better - get in touch and let us know.

It's also available on Acast, right here. 

Transitioning from ThanksBox to Mo was a big piece of work. With an outcome that I am personally really proud of. We look good right? On that journey there were a few headline moments that were key in shaping our new brand strategy and the direction we've taken. The moment I want to share with you here, was the moment that we defined our own values (how we got there and why). 

Steve from Marketing here. Thanks for swinging by!

Hopefully, this provides some insight for small, medium and large businesses looking to go through a similar process. And some learnings that you can take away from our approach.

Little caveat before I do: I come to "company values" with an air of caution. Defining company and brand values is straight up hard. Having any control of culture is just as challenging. But I will say this... everywhere I've worked has had a culture. A way things are done. A set of (normally) unwritten ways of behaving. So understanding what those are, and understanding the values we aspire to hold dear is really important.

Coming together around a set of values at our size and stage, ahead of a huge period of growth and together with a rebrand was an opportunity we needed to grab with both hands. 

Importantly, we knew that our values needed to be defined by everyone in our business. Now this is relatively easy to manage for us as we are about 20 people. For larger businesses it could be that the same process take place through technology / surveys / workshops.

Ahead of the session, everyone was given a mini brief: to think about the behaviours and values that they find important, the type of place they want Mo to be (now and in the future), and to come armed with a handful of examples that they'd be happy to share with the wider team. A few libations, lots of sugar and three hours later, we had heard from everyone.

It was a lot to take in. We had nearly 40 individual contributions. It was extremely valuable to hear directly from everyone passionate enough about them to stand up and share them. We heard what it meant to them and why. And we got to discuss them, challenge them on occasion, and really wrestle with how we might apply those values.

After the session, we had time to reflect. To think about how we might put some structure around such a wealth of contribution. We started joining the dots and understanding the real meaning and motivation behind each thing that had been shared and this enabled us to see that there was deeper meaning that joined up, what can best be described as, the "behaviours".

A behaviour is how a value manifests itself. I value fairness, so if I see something unfair my behaviour demonstrates this, I try to stop it.

When we grouped together the behaviours that had been shared by the team aligned to four values. This was a challenging, but extremely important part of the process as it meant that we could have: 

1. Simplicity: it’s important that our values are easy for everyone to understand yet beneath the simplicity there is real depth. Having more than ten values is no good to anyone. They lose meaning, become hard to understand, and they’re hard to uphold,

2. Inclusivity: With just four overarching values, we have been able to include everyones input. Understanding the real sentiment and meaning of our contributions has meant we can have simplicity, while including everyone,

3. Usability: If we can’t easily apply our values to what we do, they become unusable. In getting to clear values that are simple and inclusive we are better positioned to be able to use them in everything we do, from hiring to ways of working.

Above all we value unity. Working together we can achieve amazing things (also aligned to what we give our clients). We care about genuine compassion, honesty and respect. Together is the foundation upon which we will create meaning in everything we do. 

Some of the behaviours that demonstrated this: Solidarity and support, achieving together and willingness to sacrifice. 

To achieve our vision we must have self belief. We've got this! We know, because we are relentlessly committed. Our passion, strategy and unwavering optimism will see us succeed.

Some of the behaviours that demonstrated this: Graft and commitment, ownership and optimism.

We've got a big road ahead but together we can change the world of work. To get there we’ll take every small step that’s needed. We will inspire those around us, open minds and be practical about getting to the next leg of our journey.

Some of the behaviours that demonstrated this: Dreaming big, keeping things simple, being practical and making a difference.

It was clear from hearing what our team had to say, that we value the fun times. Granted, there is a lot to do, so it’s important that when we can we do fun things, we come together to enjoy one another’s company.

From these four values we created a values statement that united our behaviours and values - in a way that we could all clearly understand them, communicate them and come back to them when the occasion arises - because we believe that we should all be accountable to these values:

We’re now continuing to apply these values to everything that we do. 

Because we’re busy building a product that creates moments to bring people together at work, and as part of that solution we enable businesses to better understand just how their people are living those behaviours and values through our insights - we can use our own tools to understand what this means for our own values here at Mo.  

It’s called Dogfooding. And it’s a useful part in our product development. Here’s a snapshot of how our new values are being demonstrated by our people:

I’m able to see that we’re demonstrating our togetherness, belief and progress values well and consistently. But, we’re not delivering on our “having a laugh” value as often. 

I hope you found it interesting learning about the process that we went through in defining our own values, why they’re important to us and how we’ll be keeping a close eye on them. I’m off to ask for some budget to get a few socials in the diary ;)

If you’d like to know more about our People Insights, and how we are able to help you understand the behaviours and values that your people are recognising every day, get in touch. 

At first they introduced the Wealthsimple Way, a basic black and white worded document created by the founders that highlighted their beliefs and values. Although the values stayed the same Executive Creative Director, Mike Giepert, felt It didn't feel as fully realised as it should, and wanted to bring it to life. Through stunning design and storytelling they were able to give their brand a spirit. Today this is known as the Culture Manual.

At first they introduced the Wealthsimple Way, a basic black and white worded document created by the founders that highlighted their beliefs and values. Although the values stayed the same Executive Creative Director Mike Giepert felt It didn't feel as fully realised as it should, and wanted to bring it to life. Through stunning design and storytelling they were able to give their brand a spirit. Today this is known as the Culture Manual.

Mo talk to Wealthsimple about their Culture Manual

Wealthsimple is a culture-driven company that provides long-term investment management without the high fees. “We want to democratize wealth by giving the financial tools of the rich to everyone.” With this being the fundamental objective they needed to show the world who they are, and why they’re truly different from the rest.  

At first they introduced the Wealthsimple Way, a basic black and white worded document created by the founders that highlighted their beliefs and values. Although the values stayed the same Executive Creative Director Mike Giepert felt it didn't feel as fully realised as it should, and wanted to bring it to life. Through stunning design and storytelling they were able to give their brand a spirit. Today this is known as the Culture Manual.

We spoke with Mallory Greene, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at Wealthsimple. To learn more about their culture, why they created the Culture Manual, and what they’re hoping to achieve from it. 

A manual is a guiding light for your business and informs the decisions you make on an everyday basis. It ultimately creates alignment within your organization, but also showcases the important work you're doing to the world.

Our day to day work and how we treat each other is centered around the Wealthsimple Way. For example, at every all-hands meeting we give kudos to team members who best demonstrate living our values. At our annual retreat, we all voted for one employee who exemplified one of the core values (prize included). It essentially solidifies that this is how we work and this is why it's important.

We aim to hire people who will bring diversity of thought to the organization while aligning with our values. It's about building a set of standardized questions throughout the interview process and understanding how people can demonstrate those values throughout.

Our values as an organization have remained pretty consistent, with small changes as we scale. I think it's kept us grounded despite growing so fast. The beauty of creating a digital manual is that an update is as simple as any other product update. We also have an assigned team who built the manual and are dedicated to maintaining it.

My biggest tip will always be to ensure that the words you're putting into the manual are reflective of how you operate as a business, how your employees treat each other and how your culture has scaled overtime.

Check out the WealthSimple Culture Manual here

Tune in to our brand new podcast: moments. We'll be exploring work, relationships, motivation and much more.

A podcast about work. First up is Bruce Daisley. Bruce is VP of EMEA at Twitter. He also runs a sensational podcast called Eat Sleep Work Repeat and is a The No.1 Sunday Times Business Bestseller with his book: The Joy of Work. It was an honour and a privilege to have Bruce kick things off!

It’s just over a month ago that we changed from ThanksBox to Mo, and the reaction has been fantastic. 

Hearing stories about working relationships, and the role they play in peoples experience of businesses, engagement and motivation, has been extremely powerful. We’d love to hear your take on it all. So here's what it's all about if you’ve not yet checked it out. It’s clear that the way in which we’re approaching employee engagement has caused lots of conversation and we are hell bent on keeping the conversation going.

So without further ado I’m pleased to share our brand new podcast: Moments.

First up is Bruce Daisley. Bruce is VP of EMEA at Twitter. He also runs a sensational podcast called Eat Sleep Work Repeat and is a The No.1 Sunday Times Business Bestseller with his book: The Joy of Work. It was an honour and a privilege to have Bruce kick things off!

Please subscribe and let me know what you think of our very first podcast. If you'd like to be involved in any way, have thoughts on who we should speak to next, things that you want us to discuss or ways we can make it better and better - get in touch and let us know.

Only 42% of employees responded positively to the question: “I receive regular recognition or praise for doing my job well” in the firm’s second employee engagement survey — spurring action by Horwich Farrelly.

A legal firm of over 750 employees, Horwich Farrelly expanded by over 50% and spread across five sites, in only three years. A leading specialist provider of legal and handling services to the UK general insurance claims sector, Horwich Farrelly has always prided itself on putting its people first, winning an award for a revolutionary approach to performance management in Law and being marked as ‘One To Watch’ by Best Companies.

However, their rapid growth made it harder to retain the connection between management, senior partners and company as a whole, that had, until now, been very natural. The firm’s second annual engagement survey, in 2016, revealed that less than half of their people felt they were regularly recognised for a job well done.

The management acknowledged they still had a long way to go and that it was imperative to evolve their company’s culture and recognition in order to maintain the environment that had created this impressive rate of business growth. This led to reward and recognition becoming one of the seven key areas for the organisation to focus on.

During this time, Horwich Farrelly also launched their first set of corporate values. They were keen to discover a means for their employees to really live these values, to ensure that they helped shape the future of the organisation, becoming more than just ‘posters on the wall’.

"Company culture is fundamentally driven by the values of your brand; you're trying to create a connection between the brand and your people. The values of your people need to connect with the values of the company, to build a more emotional, as opposed to rational, relationship with the organisation. This is heavily influenced by the commitment of the leadership team to the values of the brand."

To scale a great company culture, it was identified that they would need to fundamentally change the actions of appreciation and recognition. This was achieved by creating visibility across the organisation and linking this recognition back to their 15 core behaviours, which were built out of the Horwich Farrelly Values & Competency framework. To achieve this, they sought out Mo — a fast growing engagement platform that prided itself on integrating their customisable and bespoke approach to the business objectives and cultural initiatives of the organisation.

Representing Horwich Farrelly, CSR Manager Eloise Sochanik and Luke Fisher, CEO at Mo, would help empower Horwich Farrelly’s people to drive a fresh and organic, cultural transformation.

Mo's vision is to help organisations create exceptional places to work, so that more people love their job. Through recognising sterling efforts, increasing company wide communication and putting an emphasis on company values, Mo weaves together, repairs and enhances the community’s culture. This makes the working life a more rewarding, encouraging and open place to be.

They provide real time, data driven analytics and feedback to help create positive action and are the only data driven solution tracking employee actions to company values.

Eloise and the firm were eager for Mo to understand the organisational structure, what a working day at the firm looked and felt like, and how recognition was given. An employee steering group was developed to give the personnel a voice in actively shaping the culture of the organisation.

After a successful day of workshops and meetings with HR, the leadership team, managing partners and the steering group, Mo were able to come away with a wealth of user stories and understanding that influenced not just the launch to Horwich Farrelly but impacted the launch process they would take forward to other clients.

Eloise and Mark Davies, Launch Manager at Mo, piloted a new means of launching the program — ‘Mo Champions’.

The new scheme led with peer recognition in order to build a culture of genuine appreciation before financial incentives were introduced. During the pilot, 53 volunteers not only trialled the system to feedback to the cooperative, but were the ones driving further adoption. Sharing messages outside of the test group would instantly invite their colleague to Mo. The exceptional advocacy of the Champions caused a viral adoption and by day two, the user base had grown by 45%. This also ensured that as the system reached all corners of the firm, it was already filled with great examples of recognition — facilitating knowledge sharing of how best to live the culture that was again rooted in the Mo Champions.

The marketing team at Horwich Farrelly prepared an exciting launch campaign featuring the managing partners and board. Introducing a more informal feel, it instantly humanised the managing partners and made them more visible; it also displayed their commitment to the program and created a sense of openness that was in line with the way that people wanted to ‘feel at work’.

The core of the marketing campaign, created by Scott Neal, Marketing Communications Manager for Horwich Farrelly, was a series of photographs featuring the partners, directors and other colleagues wearing a specially designed ‘ThanksBox Head’ (after all we did used to be called ThanksBox); these photos were advertised around the firm and on the day the platform officially launched, all employees received a box of co-branded chocolates.

"I'm really proud to have been part of the launch of Mo, which achieved 82% engagement within six months. It was challenging but great fun to be given the task of creating a launch campaign that enabled our 750 people to be recognised as consistently now, as when the firm was half size."

- Scott Neal, Marketing Communications Manager, Horwich Farrelly

It is important to note that material or monetary based rewards were not included in the program until five months after the system launch; this meant people were organically participating in the cultural shift and recognising one another without the knowledge of any incentive. The staff had bought into Mo, with the real tangible aim to improve recognition and culture amongst peers, before any regular cadence of rewards were brought in alongside it.

After the scheme had been firmly adopted throughout the organisation, and the content observed in Mo had reached a consistently high level of quality, it was time to introduce ‘Mo Thursdays’ — a monthly event bringing a series of fun rewards to the desks of the most outstanding colleagues. The managing partners personally reviewed all of the eligible recognition messages before announcing them to the firm and the rewards could be bottles of fizz, additional annual leave, chocolates or vouchers — a range of rewards to fit the needs of a diverse workforce. The act of delivering these rewards in person, created a fantastic buzz around the office every Mo Thursday.

Line managers saw how effective the new system was among different teams; they became more cohesive and the solicitors felt a higher level of recognition for their efforts. This encouraged management at all grades to become more involved, securing active participation throughout the company’s hierarchy.

The members had a new found voice, which was heard at all levels across Horwich Farrelly. By the end of the first month, the number of active users had increased by more than 300%. Since the launch in Jan 2017 usage steadily grew to 11,000 messages by the end of the year, with a consistent usage of around 92% across the whole year!

The Mo values analytics revealed: Being “A strong team player” is their most recognised behaviour. Their least recognised behaviour “Speaking up”, lead to plans in 2018 to launch Ideas as part of Mo to give employees a forum to speak up to improve the workplace.

With such wide adoption, the question remains: How do people feel? Has the culture and recognition improved? 

The data tells us; the most engaged employees, identified through Horwich Farrelly’s engagement survey a year after this initiative begun, were found to have sent twice as many messages as the least engaged departments.

Horwich Farrelly’s recent engagement survey revealed 68% of people agreed the new reward and recognition scheme has helped to create a more positive culture.

People analytics is at the heart of what we at Mo do, we’ve spent far too many hours learning, reading and debating how data can change the future of work. We’ve also recently researched 100s of HR Directors to help shape this eCourse.

People analytics is at the heart of what we at ThanksBox do, we’ve spent far too many hours learning, reading and debating how data can change the future of work. We’ve also recently researched 100s of HR Directors to help shape this eCourse.

Transform HR with People Analytics - Part 4

This article is the fourth of a four part e-course.

I hope by now you’re becoming convinced that People Analytics offers an exciting wealth of opportunities for both HR and managers when it comes to understanding their employees.

This aspirational data themed destination is not so far away either!

Understanding how your initiatives are affecting your HR and business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is critical to evaluating their success – is all of the hard work and effort your team put in to launching that Perks programme really paying off and is it still worth the investment?

Here are 5 simple steps to help you begin making data-driven decisions:

The first step is to understand the objectives of your business - this will ensure HR speaks from the same playbook as the rest of the organisation. When you come to present your business case or investment proposal and eventually, your findings, to the board, alignment to the business objectives will help with positioning and will offer some linkage to why the business should continue to invest

You have two choices here – pick the biggest, toughest mountain to climb or endeavour to make marginal improvements across a number of areas. Both represent valid choices that will follow the same methodology outlined here, while the second option de-risks initially, it does do so at the cost of depth. I always recommend trying to strike a balance between the success rate of change and how much change you aim for.

Pick the metrics that are aligned most closely to the objectives you’ve chosen and the wider business objectives. Also establish the frequency that you wish to review the metrics – I’d suggest much more frequently than once per year – as a guide, compare your metrics to things like sales, quality and customer feedback.

Given the board responsibility of HR, you’ll have access to a myriad of people data points and it is important to try and isolate to 3-5 that are materially related to your objective – this helps to avoid what I like to call paralysis by analysis. These create relevant metrics and performance indicators that will impact directly on the organisational objectives.

Here are some of the HR metrics we have seen correlating with key business objectives in the past:

Records of Early Turnover: A record of which employees are leaving in their first year.

Time until Promotion: A measure of how long it takes (on average and per employee) for someone to be promoted.

Performance Measure: The ‘nine-box grid’ method divides people into under-performers, valued specialists, emerging potentials or top talents.

Turnover: A core metric for HR, a measure of workers leaving per year.

Revenue per Employee: This is useful as a measure of the efficiency of the organisation as a whole.

Engagement: arguably this metric is one of the most important, we’ve found correlations between engagement and most other HR metrics and it’s probably one of the most important for your organisation too.

Picking the metrics you think are most likely to affect a given organisational objective will give you a clear vision for how you are using employee performance to drive the organisation forward.

Hopefully you have in mind a couple of key business objectives for next year and what metrics you think will drive them - now it’s time to make sure they’re worth the cells they’re written in!

I know, a fair test can sound pretty formal but this is data analytics after all! Some of the other areas of the business that are very familiar, perhaps even regulated about the way in which data is used, (Finance for example), will quickly identify when the story has used ‘cherry picked’ data, rather than the insights from the data guiding the story.

For any metric to be a sound measure you need to be sure it is assessed in the same way for each person and is being assessed correctly - this is at the core of assessing performance fairly and accurately.

This is most directly relevant to metrics such as employee performance, potential or competency, as they may not even be measured or set by HR themselves. Operational managers should understand best what makes a high performing employee and the qualities and competencies they look for in their teams. It will also fall to them to regularly assess and report on their team’s performance. If there are discrepancies in how thoroughly these assessments are carried out or inaccuracies how you are assessing performance then it will create misleading data at a high level. It also affects transparency to your employees over what metrics they are being assessed around- which will directly impact engagement.

Investing the time to allow operational managers to influence the data that they collect about their teams will not only build a better relationship and more management buy in to the people analytics process, it will also make for more accurate and actionable data overall.

Finally it’s time for action! The set of initiatives you choose should be designed to impact the employee performance indicators you decided on earlier and should be informed by qualitative research, perhaps from the last engagement survey, from staff voice forums or ‘Innovation Hubs’.

Once they have launched, systematically tracking their adoption and any correlated increase in your performance indicators as a result of it’s launch will help direct your efforts and measure your success. Breaking down these results by business unit and position will help you understand where you’re seeing the best results and where your initiatives are struggling - this kind of demographic based understanding of your workforce is essential to having an effective people analytics strategy.

Diagnosing exactly what is causing the success or failure is a bit more involved, but again, will create a clearer picture of what works and doesn’t in your organisation when it comes to launching initiatives. Thinking in this way, with constant measurement and experimentation, helps ensure continued success in launching initiatives in the future, as well as helping you understand the motivators behind your employee’s behaviour.

The step’s to understanding your success can be broken down as follows, broadly speaking, this methodology will set you right when it comes to assessing any data set:

Ensure data is clean and its quality can be trusted, and that you have given enough time and possess enough data points in general for this to be a worthwhile check (it’s never going to be perfect, but make sure you feel comfortable that you’ll be happy making a decision based on the information you have – if not, you may need to go in search of more data). The time needed will not always be short - as you may be soliciting a complex behaviour change and the amount of data points will come directly from the success of adoption.

Assess a correlation between your actions and the intended results, be it positive or negative.

If you find a correlation, make sure it exists when the data set is isolated over any demographics profile of interest, such as gender, business unit, location or position. If you can’t find a correlation make sure your results match across any demographics anyway. One particularly large business unit could pull your overall results either way.

Begin to understand why your results show what they do. This is especially important when the data indicates you are right- as you must be sure it is not a circumstantial correlation. Correlation does not always point to causation.

Transform HR with People Analytics - Part 3

This article is the third of a four part e-course.

You’re probably feeling a little confused, you’re reading a blog primarily concerned with HR and now you’re reading about marketing. The thing is, we believe (as you’ve probably realised) that the two departments are not quite as disparate as it may first seem.

"Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships"

The keyword here is relationships. Modern marketing more than ever before is concerned with building relationships with the consumer, creating a brand and an experience, from first touch point right through to using the product, that feels bespoke, indispensable and most importantly, creates a lasting bond.

Well… programmatic advertising can learn your online shopping habits to make sure TV adverts are tailored to you. Adwords allow businesses to bid their way into your search results. Cookies remember those trainers you tore yourself away from two days ago and let them creep into your Facebook feed. Loyalty and credit cards learn your (and your demographics) spending habits and makes sure that deal that seems like it is too good to be true comes with a weight of evidence behind exactly why it’s going to make a return.

In short; and before this gets altogether too machiavellian, your experience as a consumer is becoming more relevant to you. This is due to continue too, Amazon is about to complement their online profile of you with an offline one using smart stores.

As this tectonic shift has occurred, we have begun to experience the world differently, we are digital animals, just count the number of smart phones, laptops or tablets in your next meeting and consider the profile their use is creating.

We want feedback instantly, problems solved by real people, brands that hear us when we voice our concerns and some of the highest growth companies of recent years are either engaging in this practice or are allowing companies to engage in this practice. We also communicate differently, have access to more information and offer greater transparency in our lives - how many of your friends and colleagues do not have Whatsapp, Facebook, Instragram, LinkedIn or Twitter?

Some won’t remember life before this change, much of it developed alongside the internet. Gen Y, described as those born between 1983 - 2000, had the internet from day 1 as it was invented in 1983!

Change is a’coming - It’s not just the consumers that are changing and HR is ready for it

This is a recent thing and the workplace hasn’t had a chance to catch up. The one size fits all approach is well established, we leave our real selves at home, putting on our work selves like we put on our work clothes. But our work and home lives are destined to merge as we bring this expectation of empowerment, opportunity to share opinion openly and the demand for memorable experiences with us. Something we’ve heard time and time again as we’ve conducted research with 100s of HRDs is 50% of what I do is working, I just don’t know which!

"50% of what I do is working, I just don’t know which!"

Well, ten to twenty years ago, (ancient history as far as marketing is concerned), businesses conducted marketing and knew that it was working. Money spent on marketing made a return but identifying exactly what was converting and what wasn’t felt impossible at worst and like black magic at best. Hence; while marketing was an essential business function it struggled to behave like a strategic one.

HR is now reaching the same crossroads. Making sure your employees are motivated and engaged is essential- there are media outlets, worldwide organisations and even government initiatives devoted to educating us in why it matters. Now knowing exactly which one of your initiatives are engaging which business units, demographics and, perhaps most importantly, what groups are not responding is fast approaching.

The opportunity here is to answer some of your most important questions and priorities, by collecting and analysing the data your employees create to find meaningful information that can help inform your decisions or predict outcomes before you can. Harnessing the connection with each employees to incentivise the value they create en masse is the aspirational and strategic direction HR must face to meet these demands.

Meeting these expectations means you can...

1. Stop implementing in the dark; costly global initiatives that are assessed once a year or at best, at discrete points a several times a year through surveying are not continuous enough to create this connection.

2. Increase the employees who are actively engaged- the more our interconnected personal lives become indistinguishable to our work lives, the more seamless the transition will be and the more genuine passion and motivation will be brought to work.

3. Next week we’ll be discussing exactly how you can begin to collect the data you already have more effectively and how you can begin to customise the employee experience in way that creates data from each interaction, giving you an insight into people’s relationships, working patterns and drives.

This month we proudly launched Ideas. A neat little application that gives everyone in an organisation the opportunity to submit the next big, or even small idea. The service is really simple to use: you submit an idea, your colleagues – in fact everyone in your organisation – can give feedback; the idea is voted on and appropriate decision maker makes the final ruling on how and if to take the idea forward.

We talk to Mairi Probin who helped Iceland become Best Company (twice!)

The concept follows the idea that everyone in an organisation has the ability and right to innovate. Institutionalising innovation, or giving employees the right to step up and make a difference, is one of the best ways for businesses to come up with their next great idea. As Gary Hamel is quoted on the subject of Intrapreneurship…

“Who in your organization do you believe is responsible for fundamental shifts in strategy? There is only one right answer, and that is‘Everybody’.”

And it’s also one of Google’s not so secret secrets, decentralising the innovation process by tapping into the thoughts and ideas of its employees, empowering them to run with new ideas. If Google does it, then there’s a good precedent.

It’s not a new concept. Step back to Japan’s manufacturing industry in the 50s and 60s. The market had a pretty bad reputation for producing poor quality products. Their philosophy was to keep the production going at no matter what cost. They wouldn’t stop for anything, always striving to increase efficiency. They had quality checkers at the end of the line, but keeping up with such a rapid rate was impossible and quality suffered.

Until one fine day, a clever manufacturer decided that it was all very well being the most efficient, but if you delivered the poorest product as a result, objectives hadn’t been met. The company switched from the non-stop production line, to giving its workers the responsibility of quality control. They installed an alarm bell on every workstation and if a problem was found, the alarm was rang and everyone stopped to help resolve the problem before they were allowed to continue.

Small and continuous improvements, made by employees, helped them turn their reputation around and become a world leader in manufacturing. No small feat. It follows the Kaizen practice of continuous improvement. Kaizen teaches that regular activities, involving employees, can make continuous improvements to all functions and processes within an organisation.

Step forward to 2016 and Mo Ideas is born

Step forward to 2016 and Ideas is born. The application lets an organisation capture the best ideas from every employee and get instant reactions and feedback. From the simplest idea, such as “I think we should switch to eco ink cartridges?” To top line innovation: “Why don’t we make our bananas blue?” Well, you know what I mean!

1. An employee has a lightbulb moment and submits her idea to the Ideas Feed, chooses who to share it with – a few colleagues in her team, department or the whole company.

2. Ideas can be sorted by activity and popularity, plus you can sort ideas by subjects you’re interested in.

3. The idea gets discussed and comments can be made. Often ideas start off as good ideas and become great ideas with a little input from your colleagues.

4. Employees can vote on ideas. The number of votes an idea receives is compared to the number of views. It demonstrates how strongly the organisation feels about an idea.

5. An assigned decision maker (this can be anyone) decides what to do with the ideas; how or who will take them forward.

6. Both the employee who submitted the idea and the voters can stay updated with the idea via email and mobile push notifications.

Ultimately it’s a smart way of collecting ideas and opinions from everyone on how to continuously improve the organisation. And as the whole ideas process is now streamlined it enables positive changes to happen quicker.

David Brailsford’s marginal gains approach took the British Cycling team to new heights. Seeking these gains from every employee is at the heart of Ideas. It challenges every employee to work towards improvements and feel they have played an integral part in positive organisational change.

Even if each idea only improves efficiency or revenue by 1% or less. Together we can make significant and continuous improvements to the company.

Find out more about Ideas for your organisation here.

HR is no stranger to data analytics. For many years there have been generations of HRDs slaving away over spreadsheets to understand ROI on L&D spend, employee turnover or sickness and absence, to name a few. But people analytics is the new kid on the block.

Transform HR with People Analytics - Part 2

This article is the second of a four part e-course.

The technology, approaches and understanding have now developed to allow the collection and interpretation of the breadth of data a workforce produces.

HR professionals have long been forced to rely on enviable instincts and people skills to understand how their employees feel and how their culture is shaping productivity. These skills will continue to be indispensable and firmly at the heart of HR, but people analytics can provide an evidence base to complement, inform and measure- which as organisations grow will increase impact on the individual employee.

This will create a picture of not just what employee engagement looks like right now but also, once more predictive analytics take hold, how it will change in the future, - allowing you to understand your people at a granular level and the impact of initiatives on every employee in a meaningful way, customising your engagement strategy accordingly.

This is incredibly exciting. But should we be bothering to make sure our people management is working? Does employee engagement matter?

We’ve researched the term employee engagement with over 100 HR Professionals across a range of different companies and we’ve found that the term can be as elusively vague as it is certainly desirable.

For some it is an intangible positive feeling perhaps best summed as culture. For others it is a KPI measured each year, coupled with correlated changes in productivity. However your organisation chooses to treat and understand your employee’s engagement, you should have no doubt that it matters.

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