The Talent Agenda

Recently, I delivered a few lectures on Workforce Analytics at INSEAD and the National University of Singapore. A common question I was asked was whether analytics teams should focus more on reactive analytics or proactive analytics.

Reactive Analytics allows organizations to identify, diagnose and solve problems after they have already occurred e.g. analysis of causes of employee attrition. Proactive Analytics, on the other hand, is used for addressing issues which may not be explicit or may be an unstated need. When done well, both of these help sharpen our understanding of the problems and develop solutions.

Analytics teams need to strike a balance in spending their energies across reactive and proactive work. With ever-increasing calls from leaders for HR to be more strategic, proactive analytics will become more crucial. But, how do we figure out which areas to explore proactively? I think it would be useful for a Workforce Analytics practitioner to reflect on some key questions to discover the answer. For instance: what people-related decisions are leaders getting stuck on, where do leaders need more insights to have stronger conviction in their decisions, how do we understand the talent pool we will need in the next 3-5 years, what do we not know about our workforce that would be helpful to know etc.

If you have proactively applied analytics to solve for unspoken needs, I would love to know more. Just hit reply to this email and we can connect.

Working Better

Time management can be hard and for many, the ability to perfectly balance time is a myth. But not all hope is lost. Here is a very insightful and practical post from Chee Tung (co-founder of EngageRocket) on how to reclaim time. It is hard work to implement all these hacks, but it’s worth your time (literally).

Tiny Thought

“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson