Human resources has officially moved into the C-suite. Where HR was in the past called upon for arithmetical facts about the workforce and its makeup, the department’s new position of influence now puts it on the hook to answer qualitative questions about the state of the workforce and the future of the business. But without quantitative backing, those answers are, at best, guesswork made in good faith.

People analytics is proving a popular instrument. SHRM found in 2021 that HR teams using people analytics report achieving their DEI and retention goals and being more competitive for talent than HR teams that don’t.

But people analytics platform Visier estimates that people operations teams still spend about 70% of their time on foundational analytics, that is, figures like headcount, turnover, and diverse representation. But as HR is increasingly called upon to be a strategic contributor to the business, the team needs to satisfy complicated concerns, like, Are we underpaying in our industry? Who’s most at risk for leaving the company? And how can we keep them?

From Day One spoke with Visier’s VP of product management, Ian Cook, about HR’s move from counting workers to needing a PhD on the team just to answer business questions.

Cook develops ways for HR teams to avoid staffing someone like him to answer their people operations questions. He equips them to do it themselves, no advanced mathematics and no PhD required. At the same time while people analytics capabilities are growing more sophisticated, the tech that powers it is becoming more accessible, and many who are tasked with analysis have little to no quantitative expertise–and that’s not a bad thing.

Q: I now hear the term ‘people analytics’ more often than I do ‘human capital management.’ What’s the difference?

A: Traditionally, HR’s focus has been on process control: Who works for us? When did they start? How much are they paid? When did they move roles? Human capital management systems are the record-keeping systems for that data. That information used to be kept in file cabinets, but within the last 30 years, it’s all been digitized, and that means they’re a valuable source of useful information.

People analytics answers questions about your business: Who’s the right person for this job? If we move this department under another leader, is it still going to function? Are we paying too much for this particular set of capabilities? Your human capital management system has the record-level detail, but it has no way of taking that information, running a calculation or an analysis, and giving you the right answer. People analytics brings evidence to HR decisions.

Q: So, you answer these kinds of questions?

A: We are not a consulting business that does the work for our clients. They do the work, using our technology to find the answer for themselves, because they can.

This is a pivot from how HR typically operates, which is going to an outside expert, having them decide what’s wrong and then how to fix it. We put that capability inside the business so they can apply it themselves. Evidence doesn’t become a project from a consulting firm, it becomes the way the business operates.

Q: What do people get wrong about people analytics and how it fits into HR strategy?

A: People tend to think that you do your work, then you do the analysis later to find out whether it worked. But that’s the wrong way around. I would rather do analysis up front so we can substantiate the decisions we make. Let’s not look at it as a retroactive justification, let’s be proactive. The people analytics team is the strategy arm of the CHRO.

Others tend to think of people analytics as this weird science project. As in, we do HR, and then we do people analytics on the side. I fundamentally disagree with that. People analytics is how we should be doing HR.

Q: I hear from HR leaders that they’re getting a directive from the C-suite: Start using AI. But without further direction, some don’t know where to start and whether they can meet expectations for what artificial intelligence can do.

Ian Cook, VP of product management at Visier, spoke with journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza (company photo)

A: HR individuals are right to be skeptical about AI, because depending on how the models are built and what you’re doing with the models, you can’t just throw your people data into a model and say, Tell me who to hire and tell me who to fire. An HR professional being tasked by business leaders to use AI must educate themselves on what is real and possible versus what is not.

Q: Can you tell me more about Visier’s generative AI tool, Vee?

A: It makes the analytics process really human. Most people think in questions, like, I wonder if we’re losing people in this area. Is that normal? With the generative AI capability, you can put your question into the bot, and the bot will interpret it and return you an answer.

The traditional way these problems were solved was with handmade answers. You would build somewhere to store the data, and you would build some SQL code to run calculations on top of that, then you would put that into a different piece of technology to create charts. Someone would then assemble and distribute that.

With Vee, it sits over a customer’s data that their people analytics team would access via our platform, and opens up the opportunity for any employee to simply ask questions, in natural language, without needing a data analyst to decipher the answer, with their precise security applied.
Generative AI reduces the barrier to entry for everybody to become analytically informed. At the same time, no customer data is ever sent to a large language model which removes the fear we talked about earlier.

Q: How is it different from other AI-powered HR tools available at the moment?

A: We’re faster, cleaner, more integrated, and have a higher level of security. The teams running Visier are half the size of the traditional teams.

We don’t recommend you shrink the team because, invariably, the demand on the team is always greater than it can solve, but with the same number of people, you can serve four to eight times the number of inputs and requests. Generative AI is designed to accelerate that even further.

For instance, where a large financial institution may have 100 full-time employees running their people analytics team, one of our clients maintains just three dedicated FTEs to make the Visier component run. We’ve taken what has been a specialist, an expert, and made it into a process. We’ve created a high degree of automation, and we’ve layered in specific HR expertise, so that you don’t need to hire a whole bunch of data scientists to deliver the answers that your business needs.

Q: If you can use it to answer questions about a given business, can you also use it to benchmark a business against its competitors?

A: Sometimes ‘good’ is not an absolute inside an organization; it can be relative performance.

All of our customers live in exactly the same data shape, which isn’t true for every other competitor, so we can publish benchmarks on resignations, promotions, diversity percentage of managers, and we’ve got some design benchmarks coming out around span of control, etc. All of that can be compared against the Visier customer population and broken down by size of organization, geography, and more. For instance, with that, we were able to demonstrate that Visier customers’ resignation rates were going up slower than the market. It’s available inside the application to any customer.

Q: Could it be used to prevent over-reaction to employee attrition or engagement?

A: Yes. Lots of executives run down the corridors, worried that everyone’s leaving, going to a competitor for tons of money. But an analyst hears that and says, that’s an interesting perception, let’s have a look. Sometimes you might find that you have a problem with attrition, but you might also find that one person left this week for a competitor, and that’s just one out of a hundred. Let’s keep our money and not overplay a reaction based on a specific individual’s perception.

Q: Do you think analytics will be a permanent component of the HR function?

A: Analytics is kind of a scary word, and it’s often presented in a way to make things seem difficult and important. I would rather talk about an evidence-based HR practice.

If you can have the evidence that this program is going to manage to retain people better, why wouldn’t you use the evidence? We’re really passionate about pulling this whole practice away from having to be math experts just to understanding your people and your business.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Visier, for sponsoring this sponsor spotlight. To learn more, tune into their webinar on July 30.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Crafting an Inclusive Financial Wellness Program to Engage and Empower Employees

Financial wellness programs have become essential for attracting and retaining top talent while fostering an inclusive and engaged workforce. More than 80% of employees want professional help with their finances, says Amy Chou, chief product officer at Addition Wealth, a holistic financial-wellness platform.During a From Day One webinar Chou spoke about leveraging financial wellness programs as an integral component of an inclusive benefits strategy, empowering employees to make smart, informed financial decisions. She shared tips for designing a financial wellness program that effectively addresses the diverse needs and expectations of employees by combining digital tools with human expertise.Why Financial Wellness“Finances are really top of mind for all employees given all the changes in today’s economy,” Chou said. “The stats are really jarring.” According to the company’s research, Chou shares that 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, with credit card debt at an all-time high of $1.13 trillion. “We have the most educated workforce these days,” Chou said, but with that education comes $1.75 trillion in student debt. 27% of U.S. adults have no emergency savings; 64% of adults say that inflation is what is making it hard for them to save for unexpected expenses. And investing and saving options are becoming increasingly complicated, alienating those who might actually be in a position to start saving.These numbers are causing anxiety, with 90% of Americans reporting stress from their finances, and 34% saying it impacts their mental health. Traditional financial solutions are no longer sufficient and leave a gap in knowledge and service for employees. Financial advisors can be expensive and free tools are often too generic and unable to offer the comprehensive view needed today.Trends Impacting the Financial Benefits ExperienceThe past few years have changed the HR landscape, Chou says. Pay transparency is becoming increasingly important. Market trends have impacted hiring, even though unemployment remains low, headcount reductions have hit certain industries.The economy has changed how employees feel about their finances. Rising healthcare, living, and other costs have impacted employee financial security and demands from their benefits. And in turn, rising costs have impacted the cost of the insurance and benefits themselves, which in turn impact the employer’s bottom line. “This is where we believe financial wellness offerings come in,” Chou said.Evaluating Financial Wellness OfferingsAmy Chou of Addition Wealth led the webinar (company photo)Holistic well-being is increasingly important during turbulent financial times. There are many point solutions and benefits that employees are struggling with how to utilize best, such as inclusion emergency savings accounts, earned wage access, student loan reimbursements, tax benefits, life insurance, and more. “We think that the modern financial wellness program that can benefit an employer and employee alike is really one that stretches across all of these different areas,” Chou said. Wellness programs should be answering key questions like, ‘How do I stretch my income further? And which of these point solutions is best aligned with my personal goals?’The best programs will offer “a solution to help people decide what they should be opting into, how much they should be opting into, or the order by which they need to be doing things,” said Chou. These offerings will benefit employers, also, leading to increased productivity, retention, and more.An Inclusive Employee ExperienceA financial wellness program, Chou says, should be flexible enough to serve employees of all levels, ages, and backgrounds. The best ones on the market should offer the following six components:Holistic offerings that help with all decisions, such as retirement planning and debt management. A high-tech and high-touch model that is user friendly to both employees and employers and integrates easily with your HR systems. Fiduciaries who aren’t pushing specific products in order to make money off of commissions, product sales, kickbacks, referrals and the like may distort their incentives. “Make sure that the financial wellness player is acting in a fiduciary capacity,” Chou said, and only acting in the interests of the employee. One-on-one access to financial experts, such as certified financial planners, certified public accountants, investment advisors, financial fitness coaches and more. “Regardless of age, regardless of demographic, location, etc, if a problem gets too complicated and a person is getting too stressed, oftentimes it can be easier to talk to a person about it and to have that person guide you through and coach you through the situation,” Chou said. “A lot of these decisions are very emotional,” and can’t rely on technology alone. A personal touch may be required. Personalized to your specific company needs, ensuring your employees get individualized and relevant information on your benefits packages, compensation models, and more. “This will drive engagement and better outcomes for employees,” Chou said. Customized to the individual needs of your employees, allowing employees to choose how they want to engage (whether that’s self-service tools, one-on-one meetings, or live large-scale events) and match demographic and educational needs, including paying off student debt and planning for retirement for beginners vs. seasoned investments.The Impact of Financial Wellness Benefits“Once you get an offering that really understands a company, understands a base and understands the employee, you really can make a difference,” Chou said. Many employees appreciate the flexibility of technology-based platforms and the ability to access basic financial education that is unfortunately not really taught in schools, she shares.“You can really make a difference in your employee’s life, but also the families, the dependents, the spouses of these individuals, because oftentimes this employee that gets access to financial education can bring that into their communities and can bring that into their home to really widen the impact of these benefits,” Chou said. “And once people can plan better and manage their finances better, they really get that peace of mind.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Addition Wealth, for sponsoring this webinar. Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.

Generational Allies: Four Ways to Adopt More Age-Inclusive Habits in Your Workplace

Amy, a program manager at a tech company in Salt Lake City, learned her most valuable lesson about inter-generational relationships when she was a rookie kindergarten teacher more than two decades ago. Back then, she fully expected to have a positive educational impact on her students; after all, she was 20 years older than they were. “Of course they would learn from me,” she said. “But I didn’t expect to also learn from them.”Learning to meet someone where they are in life, to underscore their strengths and work around their weaknesses, is something she carried with her when she left teaching to work in tech, where she thinks that surprising experience helped her be a more dynamic supervisor and mentor. “I don’t expect that every team member who is 20 years or more younger than me will need my guidance. I know that there will be ebb and flow between us, and I think that makes me a better manager.” Working in a multigenerational organization can leave you surprised by what you need to teach, but also what you can learn from those who are older and younger than you. Embracing opportunities to foster a multigenerational team can help move a good organization to great. In this story, the second in a three-part series leading up to our Oct. 3 webinar on Tools to Create a Multi-Generational Workforce, we'll be looking at how employers can confront this challenge by adopting more age-inclusive practices. Here are four ways you can do that:Expand Your Hiring ProcessIf you are only sourcing potential hires who are recent grads, those who have a degree, or who are younger (and perhaps therefore lower-paid) you are limiting your organization. Even if you think you are casting a broad net, the data suggests otherwise.People in their 40s and beyond typically find it harder than younger people do to find entry- and intermediate-level jobs, according to a survey of 3,800 employed and unemployed people and more than 1,400 hiring managers. It can take more than six months to find a new job for older people, partly because of the perception of hiring managers. One quarter of them view younger candidates as having more relevant work experience than older age groups. The survey, conducted for Generation, a non-profit involved in job training and placement, reported that hiring managers think older people are less adaptable as well. However, when asked to rate the people they hired, 87% said older workers perform as well as younger ones. AARP, the nonprofit group that advocates for people 50 and older, practices an expanded search process when adding to their 2,000 person workforce. The organization ensures its job descriptions don’t overly privilege any single age group, says AARP senior advisor Heather Tinsley-Fix. “We don’t put upper ranges on experience requirements. Rather than five to 10 years, we say five or more. We don’t ask for graduation dates.” The organization has a robust internship program that doesn’t limit interns to college students. When looking for interns or candidates, AARP sources from organizations beyond universities, Tinsley-Fix says. Her organization may engage with libraries, senior centers, or civic organizations that host work fairs or put advertisements in media favored by older users.Another problem with limiting recruiting efforts to post-secondary education and training institutions is that it prevents organizations from considering those without degrees. Prior to the pandemic, companies engaged in degree inflation: requiring degrees, or higher degrees, for jobs that may not really need them. But according to a Harvard Business Review report, as hiring became more and more difficult during the Great Resignation, companies reduced educational requirements and adopted a more skills-based assessment of candidates. Postings for jobs requiring an undergraduate degree fell by 12% overall. At companies like Accenture and IBM, less than a third of the job postings for software quality-assurance engineers required a four-year degree. At the same time, ads grew more descriptive of skills the job required.Sow Accord, Root Out DistrustWhile it’s human nature to seek out those who are like us, it’s not a healthy dynamic for high-performing teams or organizations. One way to help improve understanding between different age groups is with a multigenerational Employee Resource Group (ERG). FINRA, a not-for-profit organization that oversees broker-dealers and their personnel, has more than 4,400 employees and contractors. The organization created a Multigenrational Employee Resource Group Exchange (MERGE) to specifically engage its workforce in the diversity of their points of view in life. According to the leaders of the MERGE team, Ann-Isabel Previl, Julie Petulla and Elizabeth Porter, its purpose is to give voice to each generation. They do this “by showcasing their unique and diverse perspectives and facilitating intergenerational collaboration and communication,” said Previl.There are currently four generations in the FINRA workplace, Petulla says, and in 2018 the organization’s leaders decided that providing a way to share different generational experiences and perspectives could increase understanding and decrease any prejudices. “MERGE seeks intentional opportunities to provide members the forum to engage with generations other than their own to help members increase their professional network and increase communication and collaboration among different generations.” “Each generation has different styles of communicating,” said Porter. “Our generation may impact our preferred communication platform, level of directness or formality, and use of slang. These differences in communication styles can lead to misunderstandings. For instance, over text/instant messaging, a short sentence ending in a period may look perfectly friendly from a Baby Boomer's perspective but could be construed as an angry message by a member of Gen Z. By discussing these differences openly, we can better understand our colleagues and collaborate more effectively.”MERGE has created several programs that have helped to dispel myths about different age groups and foster a better understanding. “The Workplace Through Her Eyes” focuses on how women perceive their working environment. One woman from each of the four generations at work at FINRA is asked to share their stories about work–how it was at the beginning of their career, how work attire has changed, or what’s different about communication styles. A series on financial innovation featured investment differences between generations and looked at changes in technology and attitudes towards investing. In this case too, someone from each generation shared their views and experience. “Programs like these do a great job of bringing in other ERGs to raise awareness and address issues related to creating and maintaining multigenerational collaboration in the workplace,” Porter said.Teach and LearnWhen you think of the word mentor, the image is usually an older person guiding a younger one. But according to Harvard Business Review, companies like GE, Deloitte, Cisco and Procter & Gamble are upending that tradition with “reverse mentorships” in which younger people teach older people new skills. Mutual mentorship, where a linked pair teach each other, has also been shown to “support employees’ development of competencies and skills and increase both individual involvement and collective motivation,” said HBR.Aaron Witt, CEO of BuildWitt, a services, media and software company that works with mining and infrastructure organizations, is a generation younger than company VP Dan Briscoe, but the two are unfazed by the age gap. “I don’t think we ever acknowledged being so different in age, but we have definitely leveraged each other’s perspectives,” Witt said. “Dan had way more experience in marketing and business, so I leaned on him heavily. And Dan knew I could tell stories well and leverage social media to build our brand, so he always supported what I was doing on the ‘younger’ front.”Witt says it’s critical to remember that everyone comes from a different place. It’s not just age, but upbringing, career, and life experiences. “It’s my job as a leader to know how someone thinks and what their strengths are. The better I know them, the more effectively I can position them in the right place for themselves and our business.”As someone relatively new to the business world, Witt has learned to lean on Briscoe’s expertise. While he still may have an occasional inclination that he knows better, “I’ve learned it’s best to keep my mouth shut. They have more to offer than I previously thought.”See the Differences That MatterIf you want to leverage a multigenerational workforce into your organization’s superpower, you need to understand them. There are, indeed, differences between generations. But it’s not productive to embrace the stereotypes, for example that one group is tech savvy, and one is staid and slow to change. The more valid observation is that there are differences in communication styles. Younger people may prefer texting and instant messaging. Older people may respond better to public recognition and rewards. What engages someone who is 45 may be different than what keeps a 60 year old focused. “Generational differences exist, and the research, done right, can be very enlightening,” says Corey Seemiller, PhD, who studies generational differences. “It is insightful, not predictive. If you want to understand Gen Z and you’ve never heard of TikTok, you may want to find out what it is.”She suggests getting to know how the different age groups in your organization think. She pointed to a survey she believes gets to the heart of similarities and differences between age groups. “Learn what it takes to make them thrive,” she said. It’s the same lesson that Amy, the tech-industry manager, learned as a kindergarten teacher.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, AARP, for sponsoring this story, the second in a series on how employers can foster age inclusion in the workplace. Interested in assessing how you are doing with age inclusion? Try AARP’s new tool on Managing a Multigenerational Workforce. Just send an email to employerpledge@aarp.org, with the subject line betatest. In part three of this series, we’ll explore worker-retention strategies from the perspective of different age groups. Part one of the series is What a Five-Generation Workforce Means for You: The Myths and Realities.Lisa Jaffe is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle with her son and a very needy rescue dog named Ellie Bee. She enjoys reading, long walks on the beach, and trying to get better at ceramics.

How HR Can Solve Business Problems with People Analytics

What happens to all the data HR collects? There’s the demographic information, compensation, headcount, tenure, turnover, leave, and absences of your current workforce. There’s also internal mobility, promotion rates, succession plans, performance reviews, exit interviews, and, increasingly, skills assessments and training records. And piling up at regular intervals are employee sentiment surveys and quarterly pulse data.According to a report by people analytics platform Visier, HR is investing time and resources interpreting that data, but teams are getting hung up in the foundational stages of analysis; that is, calculating figures like headcount, attrition, and demographic changes. Visier’s VP of product development, Ian Cook, estimates that HR spends about 70% of its analysis time on those low-level calculations, and it’s occupying resources better used for solving business problems affecting the bottom line. HR departments preoccupied with foundational analysis are missing the automation that produces scale. They’re sinking time into updating dashboards and calculating stagnant figures that are quickly outdated.“A human capital management system, typically, is a system of record people,” said Cook during a From Day One webinar, about how to get started with people analytics. “People analytics is a system of insight.”Some HR leaders stumble into those systems of insight by necessity. Carla Williams spent 20 years of her career in human resources. Eventually, she found herself having to answer a different kind of question. Her company’s board approved a few million dollars for one-time retention bonuses to keep highly skilled workers. But before they started cutting checks, her CHRO asked: If we hand out bonuses, are we solving the right problem?“We started an analytics project where we ultimately found that we were solving the wrong problem,” said Williams, who now leads the advisory services practice at Visier. “What we had was a career problem, not a compensation problem. Based on that, we reallocated the money and made changes that actually helped retain our high-potential employees.”Plenty of organizations do this, throwing money at personnel problems only to see poor results or chase down the same problem elsewhere. “On the surface, it might seem as though the problem is that we need to pay them more money, but when you pull back and look at the information that underlies it, then you might see a very different story.” Williams said. It became her mission to build a people analytics function to ask–and therefore answer–better questions.People Analytics Isn’t a Side Project, It’s a Business ToolIf firms aren’t using people analytics like they could be, it’s usually for lack of understanding what it is, who is capable of it, and what it can accomplish.Williams and Cook hear from HR leaders who think it takes a PhD or a data scientist working in the department to do people analytics, or that it’s better left to consultants who parachute in, but they’ve found that HR practitioners themselves are best equipped to solve their own problems.“Context is so incredibly important, and that’s why it can’t be done in a back room by somebody who doesn’t talk to people,” Williams said. “You need to really understand the business. The most important characteristic of someone who can be really great at discovering insights is experience and curiosity and having the right context. That doesn’t require a data scientist, it requires being able to ask the right questions.”Carla Williams and Ian Cook of Visier spoke during the From Day One webinar titled, "Getting Started With People Analytics: Find Your HR Superpower" (photo by From Day One)Asking smart questions doesn’t impart some higher-level math skills, so HR teams are using sophisticated analysis tools to solve problems. Tools like artificial intelligence, for example, which Cook and his team build. “Generative AI allows our clients to remove all of those barriers to access,” he said. Maybe you want to know whether you’re at risk for turnover in the next year, you might ask, Is my team engaged? Are they underpaid? “A generative system can take natural language and turn it into question sets that the technology can understand, so you can then get back the answers you want.”“Analytics should follow a talent strategy that is built off a business strategy,” Williams added. The organizations with flourishing people analytics programs start with a business problem, then go to HR because they have the greatest understanding of the company. That’s the best way to build an analytics practice: with real problems the business needs to solve.If an executive says turnover is too high and HR needs to stand up a retention program, the analyst intervenes to diagnose the problem before prescribing a remedy: Why do you think retention is too high? What does “too high” mean to you? Is turnover high across the organization or in a single department? Is this a new problem or long-term? How do we compare to others in our industry?HR departments tend to run universal programs–performance management, engagement surveys, or compensation cycles, for example–but Cook says there’s a better way. “You serve nobody by trying to serve everybody,” he said, noting that people analytics forces the business to focus on specific problems, not vague ideas of what might be going wrong.“It’s much better to focus narrowly on a specific area in the business, solving a business challenge with a key set of data in a meaningful way and then scale from there,” he said. “It’s OK to ignore 90% of the business and make 10% really successful. That will demonstrate capability, and it will likely lead to further investment.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Visier, for sponsoring this webinar.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

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