How to conduct a People Analytics Maturity Model Assessment

Assess People analytics maturity using Eckerson’s analytical maturity model

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

This article is an adaption of my work in Business leadership and communications course as part of the Northwestern Master’s in Data science program. It is an approach to analysing the analytical IQ of any organisation. I hope through my work I am also able to highlight some critical factors that drive analytical success in an organisation.

This article contains the following sections :

1. Introduction
2. Overview of Eckerson’s Analytical Maturity model
3. Overview of People Analytics Maturity model
4. How to measure Analytical maturity of the People Analytics function
5. How to measure Data maturity , Scope and Scale of People Analytics initiatives
6. Measuring Analytical culture to further support People Analytics initiatives
7. Key Takeaways

Introduction

Coming from a consulting background , I remember going through those mandatory online training courses that focused on project management , delivery principles and customer satisfaction. There were very few companies that were looking inwards at the time I started my career back in 2000. In 2008 , Google started Project Oxygen — a data driven analytical approach to answer questions about their own people such as :

• what makes a good manager
• how do we unlock the employee engagement piece
• how do we understand our own people and help them to outperform in their jobs

Since the last few years as per Bersin’s articles on People analytics , the narrative has been changing with more companies starting to focus on Human Capital. Human Capital represents the talent , skills and experiences of our employees (Arena , M 2018) and they sit at the very core of what companies achieve in today’s disruptive space. The big question which companies are starting to explore is how can we leverage data , analytical tools and methods to better understand and develop our human capital and get the best value for the business. The purpose of this article is to showcase an approach to conducting a maturity model assessment to determine where they stand in the Analytical maturity model.

Eckerson’s Analytical Maturity model

In his famous book “Secrets of Analytical Leaders” , Wayne Eckerson describes an analytical maturity model that has 4 major dimensions of analytical IQ : data maturity , analytical maturity , analytical culture and scale and scope. Companies get higher business value when they move from the bottom left quadrant to the upper right quadrant he says. Special Thanks to Wayne Eckerson for granting me permission to use this picture

Photo by Wayne Eckerson via Eckerson

Analytical maturity on the left hand side covers the company’s analytical capabilities such as the use of standard reporting to predictive reporting.

Data maturity is the challenging quadrant as it involves an integrated strategy to gather data from department departments across the organisation and consolidate them to achieve enterprise level analytics. In order for a company to be able to compete on analytics (like Amazon , Google and the likes) , an enterprise data warehouse strategy is critical.

Analytical Culture plays a significant role in delivering successful outcomes of an analytical project within the company. Hence much like our traditional transformation programs , the presence of strong sponsors , change champions , executive support sets the tone for analytical work in a company.

Scale and Scope of an analytical venture within the organisation increases as the company starts to deliver analytics in a coordinated way throughout an enterprise. In other words , People Analytics is not just about data available with HR department only. In order to understand the business drivers we will need data from Finance , Sales , IT , Procurement also.

People Analytics Maturity model

There are several approaches to People Analytics maturity models available online. One of the most widely read approaches was proposed by Josh Bersin and team in 2012. Based on my research study , I have attempted to reproduce the key levels in the below diagram. The people analytics maturity model is closely aligned with Eckerson’s 4 key dimensions of analytical maturity on the left-hand quadrant. For this work , I have assumed that Level 1 and Level 2 of the people analytics maturity model relate to Eckerson’s bottom left quadrant while Level 3 and Level 4 will relate to Eckerson’s top left quadrant.

Photo by Author

So let’s now see how we can measure the effectiveness of a company’s people analytics function. Here is a questionnaire based assessment approach containing a set of questions to support our objective. Answer options for all the questions are — Strongly Disagree , Disagree , Agree , Strongly Disagree

Measuring People Analytics’ Analytical Maturity

In order to measure the analytical maturity of an organisation , we gather responses to 3 questions (You can always brainstorm more questions with your team) :

• Question 1 : Does HR provide dashboards such as headcount , terminations , transfers , leave , recruitment with relevant metrics to managers and executives (Answer Options : Strongly Disagree , Disagree , Agree , Strongly Agree)
• Question 2 : Can HR analyse diversity , pay , attrition rates for different groups of employees based on performance , years of service etc. In case attrition is not a problem for the company , you can flip the question to a study of diversity instead (Answer options : Strongly Disagree , Disagree , Agree , Strongly Disagree)
• Question 3 : Does HR conduct external benchmarking of employee data such job grading , salary survey (Answer options : Strongly Disagree , Disagree , Agree , Strongly Disagree)
• Question 4 : HR continually develops predictive models to support strategic decision making such as conducting an A/B test to test if an HR intervention worked. An eg is to study the effectiveness of a 2 day face to face onboarding training vs an online onboarding program. Pls see my article here

Measuring Data maturity , Scale & Scope

Here are a set of questions that can help measure the data maturity , scale and scope within any organisation :

• Question 5 : Do you capture employee data in a database
• Question 6 : Does HR work with other departments to collect and harness the data to provide enterprise wide analytics for eg how did last year’s 7 pillars learning program help the sales performance of an individual or team
• Question 7 : Does HR work with other departments to capture data through organisation or department wide surveys , onboarding or departure surveys , videos and are able to run advanced analytics such as Topic Modeling , sentiment analysis to understand themes and topics being raised through employee feedback

Measuring Analytical Culture

I have introduced one question here to understand sponsorship within an organisation but one can add more such questions around change management.

• Question 8 : Does the company have HR representation (Head of HR) in the board of directors

Calculating Scores

For each question , the following point distribution is applied :

a. Strong disagree : 0 points

b. Disagree : 1 point

c. Agree : 2 points

d.Strongly Agree : 3 points

The organisation’s analytical maturity level based on the People analytics maturity model can then be calculated based on the following distribution :

1. 0–4 points : Level 1 at People Analytics model and bottom left quadrant at Eckerson Model
2. 5–10 points : Level 2 at People Analytics model and bottom left quadrant at Eckerson model
3. 11- 16 points : Level 3 at People Analytics model and top left quadrant at Eckerson model
4. 17+ points and above : Level 4 at People Analytics model and top left quadrant at Eckerson model

Key Takeaways

The key take away from my research is that building an analytical culture within an organisation is a fascinating journey that takes time. The challenge is daunting but immensely exciting to start from the bottom left quadrant (Eckerson’s model) or Level 1 (People Analytics model) with excel based reports and move up to Level 4 through the years. In my presentations, I have often heard and felt the pain in the HR professionals questions who rue the messy state of data, lack of sponsorship , lack of national level headcount data from a single database. I do want to tell them that a small push through initial grunt work and short prototype based analytical approaches can also significantly help to lay the key foundations with time for an analytical culture. Last year in Salvation Army , we started with a crazy idea of automating the entire data migration process of data from multiple payroll systems into one system Workday. At that point none of us had any clue about how to achieve this feat. My search for similar work led to an online research paper that inspired us to continue with the thought. Today we have people from different departments approaching us to know more about the tool and how they can leverage it for other projects. Indeed a beautiful experience of being part of building a data culture in an amazing company. Read about our data journey here.

References :

Arena , M (2018) Adaptive Space

Eckerson , W (2012) Secrets of Analytical Leaders

AIHR Analytics : Discover your organisation’s HR Analytics Maturity Level

Bersin’s Talent Analytics maturity model approach