Even the best analyses communicated through the best channel aren’t enough on their own. People analytics is about transforming insights into action. Achieving impactful change requires collaboration, teamwork, and a supportive community. When others trust your findings, actively collaborate in the process, and when you have a network of allies to leverage, you can ensure your findings resonate with different audiences, spark meaningful conversations, and ultimately drive results.

Collaborative Teamwork & Trust

Collaborative teamwork goes beyond simply working alongside others. It involves actively seeking diverse perspectives, communicating effectively, resolving conflict constructively, and sharing ownership of goals and results. It’s about creating a synergy where the combined effort is greater than the sum of individual contributions. You don’t need to possess every skill necessary to solve business problems using people analytics, so long as you have the skill to reach out and leverage the knowledge, tools, and resources available within a broader team to achieve success.

Explore & Engage:

Here are some actions that can help you foster more collaborative teamwork:

• Initiate or participate in cross-functional projects: Offer your expertise to teams outside of your immediate work team and learn from their perspectives. This cross-pollination of ideas can lead to innovative solutions and a more complete understanding of the problem at hand.
• Organize knowledge-sharing sessions and team-building activities: Share your insights and learnings with others in the community through workshops, presentations, or internal newsletters/blogs. Foster connections and informal collaboration through social events or team-building exercises. For example, consider starting a monthly knowledge-sharing session where members can share ongoing analytics projects or celebrate completed ones. This fosters a sense of community and excitement around common goals.
• Champion open communication and diverse perspectives: Encourage respectful debate and actively solicit feedback on ideas and initiatives. This creates a safe space for everyone’s voice to be heard, leading to more inclusive and well-rounded solutions.
• The next time you have a project to lead, build a cross-functional dream teams: Identify key stakeholders across different departments, or from different knowledge areas like HR, business strategy, legal, data science, data engineering, IT, compliance, security, real estate, finance and operations. Building cross-functional teams can be difficult when the other members do not work in the same area as you and may not share the same immediate work goals and not everyone will have the time or skills to be a core working member of the team. Identify the roles you hope people could play, the skills they can bring, or the access or information they can provide to your project but be flexible. If someone has the skills but limited time, consider asking them to be a mentor who provides only periodic feedback. For individuals with critical expertise (e.g., data privacy or legal) but limited time or passion for the project, reduce your requested involvement to only an advisory role aimed at helping ensure you didn’t miss any glaring problems. If someone has the passion and time but not currently the skills, they can be an ally who provides value as a sounding board for ideas, practice sessions for presentations, and an early adopter of outcomes.

There are many great ways you can build trust and collaborative relationships with others. The below tips are only a small set of ideas to get you started. Tips for Building Trust and Collaboration:

• Data Credibility: Because so much of people analytics deals with intangible and difficult to measure aspects, the trust you can build will be dependent on how trustworthy your data is. When sharing your insights, address potential concerns directly by explaining your data sources and methodologies. Aim to show the quality of your work while acknowledging any limitations inherent in the data or methods. Just be sure to focus on the robustness of your approach without getting too technical or detailed.
• Be a Partner: Position yourself as a trusted advisor whose goal is collaborating with stakeholders to translate data into actionable results – not simply a data provider. Involve others early on. Get their input on the process, questions, and concerns. This builds trust along with ownership and buy-in early on. When they are able to be part of the process from the start, they are able to trust the outcomes more and they are also more invested in implementing the outcomes.
• Gain Advocates: Identify and cultivate relationships with internal champions for people analytics. These allies can help advocate for your work to others.

This list of tips is intentionally short because each person builds trust and relationships in unique ways. I encourage you to take a moment now to reflect on and consider the ways you can build trust and collaborative relationships – especially while thinking about your own personal strengths and personality style. For example, many introverts find they can build stronger collaborative relationships with others through one-on-one interactions and asynchronous means such as offering their support to review and quality check for others. Or, maybe you are the kind of person who loves to celebrate the strengths and accomplishments of others, so you may choose to focus on ways of building a network that centers around showcasing the excellence of others. The ways to build relationships are just as varied and unique as the individuals involved in those relationships. We’ll talk more about building collaborative relationships and community in the next section.

Community Building

This book is all about building your capabilities for a successful people analytics career but no amount of individual skills can ever be enough, that’s because people analytics outcomes aren’t something an individual can achieve alone. You might already be fortunate to have access to a people analytics community of practice: a diverse network you can leverage through collaboration, teamwork, and knowledge sharing. However, usually you’ll need to create, build, or expand one yourself.

Community building is more than just networking. It’s about building genuine connections with individuals and groups who share your interests or goals. It’s about fostering mutually beneficial relationships, offering support and expertise, and leveraging your network to achieve common objectives. Communities thrive when everyone contributes. So plan to share your knowledge, offer feedback on others’ work, and be a reliable source of information. Seek out others who have complementary skills to you, spark insightful conversations, and bring diverse ways of thinking. Members of your community can play all sorts of roles: mentors, advisors, colleagues, peers, acquaintances, and allies. You can meet people at the places where you work or study from within the same or different areas. You can meet people at conferences or meetups, join online communities, and discover or be discovered by people through content sharing. One thing I’ve learned when building a community is that it’s best to pay less attention to a person’s job title or educational background and more to their ideas and thoughts. And remember that sometimes it’s the people who come from the most different settings from you that can provide you with the most interesting ideas and unique opportunities. If you are the only analyst working at a small non-profit organization that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from someone who’s a data engineer on a large team at a huge multinational corporation, nor does it mean they can’t learn from you. And, a senior people data scientist doing cutting edge work still has tons they can learn and gain from an intern just starting their career. When looking for community, look for passion not position.

Explore & Engage:

Before you can build a community, you have to know people. Then to build a community, you have to have relationships that matter. To build your community, first build a network and then foster select relationships to nurture relationships so that some of those connections go from being just people you know to people who enable, support, inspire, and empower you. Here are actions to help you build your network and community:

Networking: Networking is a key gateway to collaboration and opportunity. It can involve attending conferences, joining online communities, or collaborating with colleagues on projects. It’s not just a social activity only for extroverts. It’s about identifying people who share your passions and interests, or those with complementary knowledge and skills. Think of networking as the initial step toward building genuine connections. A strong network can provide access to valuable insights, support your career advancement, and open doors to new collaborations. There are many ways to network that don’t involve chatting it up at a happy hour or just clicking ‘connect’ on the social media profile of someone you’ve never interacted with. In-fact, you’ll notice that this list of activities has just as many non face-to-face interactions as it does typical ‘networking events.’

• Attend industry conferences and events: Search for upcoming people analytics events and sign up. You’ll be surprised how many happen regularly both in-person and online. And if you can’t find one, consider creating a meetup or event and inviting people in your area. This is a fantastic way to learn about trends, share your own knowledge, and expand your professional circle.
• Collaborative Teamwork with Colleagues: Working with colleagues on projects is one of the best ways to build deep, strong connections centered around shared interests and common goals.
• Shared Learning Experiences: Take courses or attend workshops alongside others. There are plenty of asynchronous ways to learn, but a learning opportunity that provides opportunities to interact with other learners creates unique network building experiences you can’t find through many other means. In these kinds of settings you are sure to find people who share your same desire for self-learning, shared topics of interest, and you will already have learning topics around which you can start deep meaningful discussions.
• Volunteer Your Expertise: Share your skills by volunteering within or outside your organization. Contribute to open-source projects or offer free consulting/internships to gain experience and build your network. This not only benefits your own skill development, it also allows you to build valuable connections with like-minded individuals while applying your skills in new contexts.
• Connecting Online: Join online communities and connect with other people analytics professionals online. The internet provides so many opportunities to meet a variety of people, and also for you to be as interactive and intimate (or not!) as you are comfortable. Building community online isn’t about number of connections or likes. And there isn’t only one way to connect or interact. You don’t have to limit yourself to ‘normal’ ways of using any certain social platform; use them to support the kinds of interactions you are most comfortable with. For example, many people turn to X (Twitter) to have open dialogue and debate in comments, but it’s okay if you prefer to stay more anonymous. If you see a post that inspires you, you could send a private message thanking that person for their insights. Or, maybe you see someone’s request for help on a community discussion forum, but feel you could only help if you were able to have a dialogue with them rather than just a one-sided written reply; you can let them know you’d be available for a one-on-one chat. I encourage you to actively engage with the community by asking insightful questions, sharing your expertise, and following relevant individuals and organizations. Participate in discussions, share your knowledge, and learn from others in the field. LinkedIn is a great resource to find pre-existing groups interested in people analytics conversations. For those who’d like to start forming connections with others who are on this same people analytics career journey, I’ve created a LinkedIn group for anyone reading this book. Please join and start a dialogue! Group link: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14487429/
• Public Content Creation: Share your thoughts and ideas publicly online can to attract others with similar interests, leading to potential connections. Blog posts, articles, books, case studies, podcasts, webinars, conference presentations, news interviews, research studies, … the options for sharing your knowledge are varied and many. Get out there, share your knowledge, and when possible let others know how they can contact you. (I for example am sharing this book and I would love to have you as part of my network. You can find me at heatherwhiteman.com and I put all my contact information in the last section of this book, please reach out and say hello!)

Engaging Authentically: Many of the activities you undertake to build a community are similar to those you might do while networking. But the big difference is the depth and quality of the interactions you have and of the resulting relationships you have with people. To build a community start with your broad network and continue the same network building activities, but prioritize deeper, quality interactions and genuine connections with people that motivate, challenge, inspire and grow you. Community building is about fostering mutually beneficial relationships, offering support, and leveraging your network to achieve common objectives. So look for opportunities where you can also help and provide value to those you are connecting with. Here are some actions you can take to turn connections in your network into members of your community:

• Find opportunities to continue working with individuals you’ve had successful collaborative teamwork with in the past.
• At the end of a successful project, bring the team back together to celebrate – this will help solidify your connections and positive relationships while giving you another chance to interact and bond. Also discuss opportunities for doing more work together in the future.
• Schedule time to reconnect with individuals you met at a conference, training, meeting or other event in which you shared a passionate dialogue. Tip: Schedule this immediately when you meet someone new that you have clicked with.
• Ask to be mentored or be a mentor to others.
• Ask for feedback on your own or offer to provide feedback on other’s work.
  • Introvert Tip: Asking for feedback on your work (or some other work item or topic such as asking their opinion on a method or idea you are considering using) is a great way to start more meaningful dialogue on a shared topic of interest. It takes away the pressure of needing to come up with small talk. Moments of silence are natural and expected since you need to give that person time to think and process their thoughts. Just don’t forget to engage fully with their responses; ask follow up questions and provide your own views on the topic. The goal is to have a dialogue, not for them to feel like they are being grilled in an interview.
• Follow, continually engage with, and support the work of others you admire.
• When others engage with you online, always reply and respond.