By understanding where human capital investments are working — and where they are not — you can make targeted adjustments that improve impact over time. Suppose you knew that your leadership development program was working for boomers but not millennials — would you change anything? If your sales training was working in the U.S. but [...]

What is a proof of causation, really? How can we establish the connection between an investment and a business effect or say which metric drives another? Why should we strive to get to causation using our big data? Because to compete in today’s competitive environment, we need to know which people investments change our business [...]

Any time you walk into a doctor’s office, whether it’s a hospital or a bush clinic in a tent, someone takes your pulse and temperature. This sort of basic triage is fundamental to understanding your data.

This sort of fundamental information on dashboards and scorecards gives you what we would define as descriptive statistics. They [...]

Last week we discussed data from anecdotes and storytelling. This was the beginning of the human capital analytics continuum. This week I want to talk about scorecards and dashboards.

Scorecards, most notably “balanced scorecards,” are a strategic performance management tool that can leverage automated surveys to track how an organization executes strategy and the consequences [...]

Last week I presented you with the human capital analytics continuum. This continuum is a look at how organizations collect and report data.

It begins with anecdotes or storytelling. Professor Robert Brinkerhoff has some of the best work in this area, describing a mixture of ethnography and positive psychology in Success Case Methodology. We use [...]

The No. 1 excuse I hear when executives are asked if they are measuring their human capital is that their data is messed up, incomplete and hard to get. This stems mainly from a fear of what is now termed big data. The truth is, your organization is awash in data. You need to figure [...]

There has been quite a bit written recently about big data and the power of analytics. This label, “big data,” scares many in our field and leaves others perplexed. How do you take all of this data floating around and make strategic human capital decisions? Don’t be afraid of it and remember that data is [...]