What do you think of when you hear the word, data?
No, I’m not talking about the overly pale Lt. Commander of the USS Enterprise (that would be spelled with a capital D)or your cell phone bill (no one wants to read about that). I’m talking about insight; the untapped analytics of just about everything, including your organization’s culture. Understanding your teams, the inherent soft skills within them, and the culture they desire will help you retain happy employees, create higher productivity, and attract clients who have the same values as your team. But, before you add a personal chef to the payroll and a high dollar espresso machine in the break room, let’s talk about what a healthy business culture actually looks like, why it is so important, and how data can help you understand your company’s culture better.
Your company culture is the soul of your organization. It is how your business interacts with each other, your clients, and how your team speaks verbally and non-verbally with the outside world. It is the values, expectations, and guidelines your leadership defines, lives by, and extends to the rest of the team. Just like a thumbprint, every business will have a unique culture built by what values they prioritize, the soft skills of their teams, and the guidelines they set.
“Culture guides discretionary behavior and it picks up where the employee handbook leaves off. Culture tells us how to respond to an unprecedented service request. It tells us whether to risk telling our bosses about our new ideas, and whether to surface or hide problems. Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own every day, and culture is theirguide. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is of course most of the time.” -Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, Harvard Business Review
SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) reports in 2017 that the largest percentage of workers in the workforce come from the Millennial generation (37%) with Gen Z following close behind (35%). According to forbes.com, “With 51%of millennials being open to the possibility of another job opportunity, and with 38%of millennials expecting to leave their current employers for such opportunities within two years, it’s important that employers learn how to build company cultures that attract and retain millennials.” Learning how to retain the largest percentage of the workforce helps keep costs down, improve employee morale, and create loyal employees.
By understanding the personality and soft skills of your employees, you will build a strong culture while also identifying opportunities within your organization. To do this, you need data. People analytics is the data that executives, HR departments, and managers use to make decisions related totheir employees. These can include demographics like race, age, and gender, but can include complex data like email habits of an effective manager and the personality traits of a successful sales person.
At Alyss Analytics, we are using video and audio data to better understand people coming into organizations and measuring them over time. Whether that is hiring a helpful call center employee and then identifying burn-out or celebrating a positive department, we are using data to measure employees and in turn, culture.
Having a strategy to measure your company's culture helps the bottom line while also retaining happy employees. This makes for better customer service from a loyal workforce, a decrease in HR costs that are sure to make your shareholders smile, and a positive work environment which is good for all. Data can help you measure your organizations greatest resource - your human talent - and understand the impact of soft skill metrics and human behavior on performance outcomes and service longevity.
The key to future success within organizations will be their willingness to explore and better understand the people analytics of their teams allowing for employees to have those skills maximized and placed in the best fit positions within a work environment. Alyss Analytics looks to be a trusted partner in this rapidly evolving world centered around technology and people analytics to help businesses meet their workforce and ultimately, their big picture market goals.
For a demonstration of Alyss, please contact our VP of Strategic Partnerships, Taylor Stevenson.