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June 2013 - TD Magazine

An interview with Laurie Bassi, CEO, McBassi & Company

An Interview with Laurie Bassi

Laurie Bassi is the CEO of McBassi & Company, a leader in using behavioral economics to improve organizational performance. Laurie is a prolific author, with more than 90 published papers and books, including Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era (Berrett-Koehler) and  The HR Analytics Handbook (Reed Business). She holds a PhD in economics from Princeton University, an MS in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University, and a BS in mathematics from Illinois State University. Follow Laurie on Twitter @goodcompanybook.

Laurie Bassi

Spring 2016 - CTDO Magazine

Seven steps to using analytics to improve the evaluation of learning.

What’s the Business Impact of Learning?

Employee surveys provide fact-based, actionable for measuring employee engagement and other HR analytics. Laurie Bassi and Dan McMurrer outline three areas to help you get the most value from your employee surveys.

How to Get Valuable HR Analytics From Your Employee Surveys

Senior executives are increasingly demanding that the talent development function provide actionable insights for driving better business results through targeted improvements in the management and development of people. Talent analytics is increasingly expected go far beyond traditional HR reporting on headcount, time-to-fill vacancies, and employee engagement benchmarking. Instead, there is a growing demand for analysis about how to cost-effectively improve:sales productivitycustomer servicemanagerial effectivenessemployee well-beingworkforce diversity and inclusion. The message is clear: The bar for talent analytics is raising—and raising quickly. So, how do you move your analytics from where they are to where they need to be?In the end, advanced talent analytics capabilities can't just parachute into your organization. You have to build them. Here’s how. Create organizational and broad-based executive support by producing insightful, succinct reports and analyses. Ensure that data and analysis is presented from the executive's perspective—not the perspective of your department.Develop an analytics strategy that's aligned with your organization's overall business strategy. This will help you produce business intelligence and actionable insights that enable leaders at all levels of your organization to drive better business results through focused, targeted, and achievable improvements in the management and development of people.Grow the size and skills of your analytics staff (or find a trusted external analytics consultant). Don't focus exclusively on technical skills. Business acumen, collaboration, consulting, and presentation skills are all critical elements as well.Expand the scope of your talent analytics initiatives to encompass all essential aspects of people management and development, including:recruiting and onboardinglearning and developmentperformance and career managementrewards and recognitionengagement and retention. Where to Start? If you're like most talent development leaders, you have limited resources but high expectations and requirements to fulfill. Consequently, you need a plan that enables you to focus on the right things—and to get them done in the right order. Of course, that will be shaped by your organization's current analytics capability.We've designed a quick (and free!) online assessment tool to objectively measure your current level of analytics maturity, along with recommendations on the most important focus areas, in light of your relative strengths and weaknesses. The assessment takes less than 10 minutes to complete, so why not give it a try right now? Click here to begin the analytics self-assessment. We hope you find the self-assessment useful. What’s more, if you'd like to have a quick call to discuss your assessment and feedback and think through next steps, don't hesitate to contact us at Lbassi@mcbassi.com or Dmcmurrer@mcbassi.com.

Become Better at Talent Analytics

 A recent CLO article reported that nearly 60 percent of CLOs are dissatisfied with their internal learning analytics capability. The article states that, “This reflects an ongoing trend: The state of measurement in learning and development is falling behind other areas of the business. CLOs are more dissatisfied with their organizational approach to measurement this year than last, continuing a trend of the past three years.” In short, a different approach is needed in most organizations. More of the same (which typically means using Kirkpatrick levels 1-5, with an emphasis on the lower levels) won’t get CLOs where they want to be—understanding what’s working (and what isn’t) in learning and development initiatives and targeting resources at the most fruitful areas for improving business results. Instead, a more modern, “analytics-enhanced” approach is necessary. Here’s what we’ve learned about how to transform an organization’s learning analytics: #1: Create an “authentic” learning impact evaluation by embedding it in a more holistic framework. The fundamental problem with traditional (Kirkpatrick) learning evaluation is that it’s done in a vacuum. While some Kirkpatrick evaluations definitely have their place, a more authentic way to evaluate the impact of learning is to embed it in the larger context of measuring the overall management and development of a company’s people. In particular, companies should seek to identify opportunities to learn from “naturally occurring variations” in people’s work, learning and leadership environments. All of those variations (not just learning-related ones) should be used to assess and predict variations in business outcomes. This requires that the CLOs office collaborate with—or take the lead to create, if necessary—an analytics “center of excellence” within the organization.#2: Stop waiting for the perfect data warehouse. Instead, create a “data hut.” At their core, data warehouses are designed for reporting—not analytics. So the sooner you realize that your organization’s data warehouse (whether current, pending, or hoped-for) is never going to enable you to do the learning analytics that you need, the better off you’ll be. To undertake analytics, you need to start by putting together heretofore disparate pieces of data (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Build a HR Analytics “Data Hut” This will enable you to do the following:Take a big step toward embedding your learning evaluation in the larger context of evaluating people management and development (step #1 above).Analyze why you are getting the impact that you are getting (not just what the impact is).Produce actionable insights about what levers to pull to create better business results through learning. #3: Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Generalizing #2 above, in the early days of creating an analytics-enhanced learning evaluation, you will almost certainly not be able to obtain all of these disparate pieces of data and integrate them into a unified analysis file. But don’t let that become an excuse for inaction. Start by putting two of these pieces of information together; for example, data from your LMS with employee engagement, or turnover data, or customer satisfaction data, or sales data. The important point is to begin to make progress, rather than to continue with the (unsatisfying) status quo. #4: Choose your initial analytics project carefully. The best place to start is with a burning business issue. Examples might include one or more of the following:customer satisfaction problemslackluster salessafetyhigh levels of regretted turnoverfailure to achieve diversity and inclusion goalsstagnant or declining employee engagement. Design your initial analytics project to provide actionable insight on issues that are front-and-center for senior executives, and you will find yourself in a much better place. #5: Start under the radar. Making progress toward better, more powerful, analytics-enhanced learning measurement does not have to take a lot of time or money. Choose the right initial project (#4) without fanfare. Just go do it. Use the findings from your first project and capitalize on the enthusiasm it will engender when properly presented (see #6) in order to bootstrap up your learning analytics budget and capability. #6: Remember: insightful reporting trumps data dumps. Learning analytics is both a science and an art. The art comes in how you present the findings from your analysis. Less is often more. So, focus on what executives need to know to drive better business results, and avoid the temptation to share every nuance and cool thing you might have learned in the course of the analysis. #7: Use learning evaluation to improve the effectiveness of learning. It will also be tempting to use your new-found analytics capability to prove that “learning is working.” It’s far better, however, to use it to develop actionable insights for improving the business impact of learning. Doing so will generate significant returns in terms of the enhanced credibility and support that learning enjoys within your organization.Want to learn more about improving learning evalution? Join us for the next offering of our Evaluating Learning Impact Certificate program.

7 Steps to Using Analytics to Improve the Evaluation of Learning

 HR analytics holds the promise of helping organizations to operate in the sweet spot—the intersection of sustainably profitable and enlightened management of people. Aspiring to achieve this outcome is a powerful impetus for designing, executing, and sustaining your organization’s HR analytics strategy. It’s always important to start with the end goal in mind. And ideally, it should be BHAG (a big hairy audacious goal, such as the one noted above. Otherwise, your HR analytics efforts run the risk of devolving into another HR-check-the-box reporting initiative long on activity and short on value. To achieve your BHAG—and avoid falling into an activity do-loop—you’ve got to start by asking the right questions. This requires looking beyond HR’s or L&D’s perspective and thinking like an owner or investor in your company. So, rather than focusing on solving HR problems, such as reducing time to hire or improving training evaluations, think like someone who has (or is considering) investing in your organization, regardless of whether it is a publicly-traded company or not. What is it that any potential investor would want to know about the people side of your business? Most investors focus pretty quickly on an organization’s capacity for growth, which includes the people-related risk that the business will not have the human capabilities critical for growing the business. How could your strategic HR measurement and analysis inform an investor’s perspective? And of course, your Board of Directors should want to know everything that investors want to know, and then some. Similarly, your CEO, CFO, and the executive team should want to know everything that the board wants to know, and more. And senior HR leaders should want to know everything that the executive team wants to know, plus still more. You get the idea. Now, here’s the thing: The current reality is that investors, boards, and executive teams are asking for (demanding) only a very limited set of HR metrics. That’s because they don’t know that more is possible. Your job is to educate them—so they know they can and should expect actionable insights that provide them with the facts and analyses they need to make better business decisions. More importantly, these facts and analyses need to go far beyond executive comp and executive-level succession planning. That is the essence of HR analytics. (See our blog post from last month for more detail on this.) Here’s our advice. Rather than focusing on the traditional narrative about the great value that HR and L&D can create, incorporate into the narrative perspective on the critical risks that your work mitigates. Risk is, in fact, the other side of value creation.Another very important lesson we’ve learned in our work with clients of all sizes and industries is that “risk sells”—all decision makers are concerned about it and want to understand better how to minimize it. Here’s a human capital risk framework to get your creative juices flowing:Capability Risk: Do your people have the knowledge, skills, resources, and business processes that will enable them to perform effectively?Alignment Risk: Do your people really understand your business strategy and goals and do their day-to-day jobs in alignment with those goals?Turnover/Demographic Risk: Are you retaining key people? Do you have a pipeline sufficient to replace departing employees? Are you able to achieve/maintain diversity in your workforce?Labor Market Risk: How are labor market conditions impacting your ability to find and acquire the right people?Health/Well-being Risk: Do what extent does your work environment contribute—positively or negatively—to the safety, health, and well-being of your employees?Leadership Risk: Do you have the leadership depth and quality needed to ensure that key initiatives will be successful?When you stop and think about the work that goes on in the HR and L&D functions, every activity, project, and initiative is designed to mitigate one or more of these risks—by creating people-related value for your organization. By expanding your thinking, language, metrics, and analysis to incorporate the risk-mitigating impact of your work, you will lay the foundation for an HR analytics strategy that is worthy of sustained, high-level executive and organizational support. The most appropriate risk-based BHAG for your organization will depend on your organization’s specific people-related challenges. Maybe you use HR analytics to evaluate your skill pipeline in the areas of the business where turnover is the highest. Maybe you target capability risk, such as using employee survey results to identify under-performing subunits and determine which processes or resources need to be improved to help those units perform better. The only limit is your imagination—and having the available data! Remember: HR analytics is not about generating piles of reports. It’s about generating insights in areas that affect the very life-blood of your organization.

HR Analytics: Get Started by Thinking Big

Laurie Bassi and Dan McMurrer explore the why, what, how, and when of HR analytics.

A Quick Overview of HR Analytics: Why, What, How, and When?

So folks, this is my last “guest blogger” entry for ASTD. By way of quick recap, here’s the argument I’ve made to date:    A convergence of economic, social, and political forces has created a growing economic premium for Good Companies – those that are good to their employees, their customer, their communities, and the environment. Simply put, they make more money than the ‘bad guys.’    It is impossible to be a Good Company (at least for long) without being a Good Employer.    Hence, the economic premium associated with superior “human capital management” is enormous.    And yet, most organizations run the “people side” of their business largely by guesswork and hope.    This undesirable state of affairs is entirely fixable, and there is competitive advantage in doing so.    Doing so requires learning to tap the wisdom of your workforce, a task that typical employee “engagement” surveys are not up to.If you’re with me up to this point, you may be wondering, “What’s next?  How can I help my company take off the blinders and learn to navigate in this new economic landscape?”  Here’s my answer:1.    Stop wasting money on your out-of-date employee engagement/satisfaction survey.  Replace it with a “smarter” survey that mines the gems of wisdom from your workforce about how to improve your standing as a good seller and steward (as well, of course, as a good employer).  For a quick example that will give you instant feedback on how your company stacks up as a GOOD COMPANY, click here.2.    Apply business intelligence tools to the data you collect in step #1 so that you can get beyond gut and intuition.3.    Focus on creating insightful analysis and reports, not data dumps.  You will find that when you provide leaders with actionable business intelligence about how to improve business results,they will act on it.By doing these three things, you will help make your organization a better and more profitable place to work – and in so doing, you will also help make the world a better place.  You will be doing worthy work.Laurie Bassi is CEO of McBassi & Company. lbassi@mcbassi.com

The Good Company Assessment

If my chosen title makes you roll you eyes because you think there is no wisdom in your workforce, read no further. This isn’t for you.If you’re still with me, here’s the bottom line. There is enormous, but typically untapped, wisdom in an organization’s workforce. If you learn how to tap that wisdom, you can use it as a source of competitive advantage.Here are the four steps that will get you there:Step #1 –A “smarter” employee surveyAs I argued last week in Debunking Employee Engagement Myths traditional employee engagement (or satisfaction) surveys are simply not up to the task. The problem is that engagement is a psychological construct about what motivates individuals to grant the gift of their discretionary effort. While that is necessary for great producing results, it isn’t sufficient. It fails to adequately capture important “organization-level factors” necessary for making the best possible use of employees’ time. And perhaps more important, it fails to capture other gems of the workforce’s wisdom about how to improve your standing as a good seller and steward – standing that creates enormous economic benefit.Step #2 –“Linkage analysis” to business outcomesStatistically linking a thoughtfully-constructed employee survey (step #1) to other data – such as customer satisfaction measures, sales numbers, cost containment effectiveness, 360 degree feedback – enables you to identify with precision and rigor the human drivers of key business outcomes. This is the essence of creating actionable business intelligence on the “people side” of your business. See my blog How to Create Actionable Business Intelligence on the “People Side of Your Business.” Step #3 –A rigorous, fact-based process for identifying the most important areas of opportunityTo identify the most important areas of opportunity for improving business outcomes, it is necessary to statistically combine two pieces of information: (a) measures of relative strength and weaknesses (from Step #1) with (b) measures of the statistical importance of each of the various human drivers of business outcomes (from Step #2). It takes both of these pieces of information, combined in a disciplined manner, to come to the right conclusions about where the organization should be focusing its attention and budget in order to create great results.Step #4 –Insightful, easy-to-understand recommendations for improving business resultsGetting to Step #3 represents a huge shift for most organizations – one that would put you well on the path to become more strategic. But unless you learn to communicate the findings from your analysis in an insightful and easy-to-understand manner, you will not get the full advantage of this breakthrough.  A data dump – a lengthy PowerPoint presentation of one graphic after another – does not create insight. It is simply a data dump. So the last step is to work hard to communicate simply and compellingly. This is as much art as it is science – but a skill that is well worth developing.Laurie Bassi is CEO of McBassi&Company, lbassi@mcbassi.com

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