27 The Foundation of People Analytics

Data analysis and visualization are the rockstars of people analytics. They are the flashy techniques that get all the attention on stage, but they are useless on their own. Imagine spending hours analyzing your data, finding something really neat, getting your visualization just right, and then discovering that everything is just… wrong. Sadly, this happens often and when it does it is usually because the analysis was undertaken without first ensuring sound data management or because considerations of validity, reliability, or relevancy were ignored. As the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out.”

Earlier I used an analogy of baking a cake to explain how you don’t need to know all the details of statistics to do analytics (e.g., you don’t need to know how the oven works in order to use it to bake your cake). So, let’s continue that analogy here. Your analysis skills are like baking skills. You can be a whiz with all sorts of fancy techniques; you can know how to beat the eggs, sift the flour, whip the cream, and fold the ingredients like a pastry chef. Your visualization skills could be on par with that of a professional cake decorator whose frosting and icing skills are worthy of winning one of those reality TV cake contest shows. But if your ingredients (data) are rotten, that cake is going to be disgusting.

This is why data management and research method skills are so important to a career in people analytics. Data management is the quality check. It’s the process by which you make sure everything is good and right. In our baking analogy, data management means checking that the right ingredients are used, that they are fresh and of good quality, it means ensuring everyone is kept safe by following proper health, sanitation, and safety processes, and would even include things like proper food storage and kitchen appliance use.

Effective data management ensures quality and integrity throughout the entire process, from collection to analysis to reporting and beyond. Data management helps us make sure that when we get to a number it is correct, accurate, and that we got there in an appropriate way.

If data analysis and visualization are the ways we put all the cake ingredients together and data management is how we ensure that the right ingredients and processes are used to put it together. Then we can think of some of the aspects we gain from research methods like taste testers, customers, food critics who will ultimately weigh in on whether your cake is any good. Because let’s face it, even if you correctly make a delicious and beautiful lemon chiffon cake using all the best ingredients, you are still going to upset the person who asked for and was expecting a double chocolate fudge cake. We can borrow skills from the research world to help us assess how reliably our analyses can be used to make inferences, how well they measure what we intend to measure, how valid the insights might be, and whether or not our findings will be relevant for different decisions. Because people analytics involves the measurement of many interrelated aspects it can actually be pretty hard to know what kind of cake you are making. For example, are those survey results a measure employee satisfaction or employee engagement? And, how good of a job does the survey do at measuring it? To get at these kinds of tricky questions skills in research will be required.

I realize you may now need to take a break from reading to go get some cake, but after you do that, come back and we’ll talk about the data management and research skills you may want to build in your people analytics career.