When to start reporting
Got no time for [analysis] \ Yes, I'm [reporting] all the time
A head of a smaller people analytics team recently told me about a report they’d put together for their CEO. They put a lot of effort into wrangling their less-than-clean data into a clear and meaningful summary of attrition trends. Executive interest and buy-in were high, which is why the CEO reviewed it — and then said, “Great! Thank you. What do I do with this?”
Most people analytics teams run into this problem from time to time — there is an expectation that the people analytics team should be putting together reports so executives have a sense of what’s going on. What isn’t so clearly communicated is the expectation that the people analytics team should also tell executives what to do with it. That’s fair, but it takes time and effort to do well.
Alessandro Linari recently put together a writeup of his experience building out the people analytics team at Vodafone. The whole piece is well worth reading. I was especially drawn to his counterintuitive observation about when to spend time on reporting, and his acknowledgment that just because reporting requires less statistical knowledge, it’s still time-consuming.
"Reports and dashboards are very labour-intensive and should not be in scope for an early-stage team, which has limited resources and needs to prioritise high value projects over business-as-usual activities."
Reporting is almost synonymous with early-stage people analytics teams. Many teams start out as reporting functions and then work to add analytics capabilities (by which I mean the ability to answer questions with the data, beyond summarizing trends). Alessandro’s suggestion that reporting and dashboarding wait until the team is more established goes against the grain, but makes a lot of sense to me.
Focusing sparse resources on answering key business questions — where it’s clear what action will be taken based on the analysis — will usually create more impact than standing up a bunch of dashboards that may or may not ever get looked at. Or, that if they are looked at, don’t lead to clear actions.