Creating a Community of People Analytics Peeps

Although people analytics is a growing field, the presence of HR analytics isn’t as large in Seattle like you see in the Bay Area, so a small group of us decided to do something about it.

Since people analytics is about using data to inform your people programs, we sent out a survey to everybody we knew in the field around the greater Seattle area to understand what types of content would be most beneficial for our group. We asked where they were on their people analytics journey, what topics they’d be most interested in hearing about, how often we should get together, if they’d be willing to speak (!), and what success would look like if we decide to officially create a forum.

After looking at results, we sketched out a draft agenda and decided on a date. Then, everything happened simultaneously: we emailed everybody who indicated they’d speak to ask them if they were available, scheduled with the foundation’s conference center, and crossed our fingers that people would sign up.

I wish I could say that people were knocking down our doors to come to our event, but things kicked off with a slow start--we asked our friends in the area to share the invitation with others they knew, but at the end of the first week, only our immediate teams had signed up. Word slowly creeped out though, as two weeks before the event, we hit capacity (and even had to wait list some people!).

With the Gates Foundation hosting the first ever Seattle People Analytics Forum (our colleague Jon kept joking it was a “nice SPA day”), we organized a packed day:

Kira Wenzel of the Gates Foundation moderated a panel around Approaches, Methodologies, and Myths in People Analytics. The panel consisted of Nat Aichel from Amazon, Mizuki Asano of Zillow, and Anthony Ferreras of Nordstrom, all who lead separate groups within their respective companies around people research or HR analytics. My favorite parts of this panel included when Mizuki spoke on how she convinced the business to have a dedicated people analytics group, Anthony spoke of scaling his team beyond “workforce insights” and into predictive analytics, and Nat mentioned how her team requires their partners to use an intake form that helps her team prioritize instead of guessing at whose work is more important.

Levon Johnson of Alaska Air had the wittiest title of the day, speaking on Overcoming a Crap Rap and Mishap with a Recap and Heatmap (although during his talk, he confessed it was really a thematic map since it had geographic boundaries). He took the audience through Alaska Air’s journey from basic HR metrics to automated dashboards that mimicked dashboards his leadership was familiar with to help them become more data-driven around people decisions.

Tim Graciano of Amazon spoke on ML in HR, where he gave a primer on machine learning for people who aren’t data scientists. He demystified the process, talking about what you should or shouldn’t automate, what you need to get started in machine learning, and how machine learning within HR specifically can work.

Royce Hart of Microsoft talked about Talent Analytics for Organizational Impact, in which he shared a framework and blueprint the audience could use to walk into an organization and stand up an analytics program. He spoke about getting your partners to think about the questions they’re trying to answer and keeping them informed of your broader work by a quarterly business review.

Elyse Rike of Amazon’s presentation was more of a guided group discussion around Building Analytics Communities. Elyse has created some pretty interesting groups within Amazon across different verticals and shared her tips for getting buy-in from others. After attending her talk, I’m convinced more than ever that I should get her involved in the next round of SPA forums!

Gary Russo of Providence St. Joseph Health talked about Positioning People Analytics as a Business Influencer. In this presentation, Gary introduced his organization, spoke about how analytics works within Providence St. Joseph Health, and then used examples to show the process they follow to deliver the highest business value projects.

Mortiz Sudhof, OG data scientist from Kanjoya (and currently at Stanford) spoke on Active and Passive Listening (and what all of this has to do with the 2016 election). During his talk, Mortiz shared how passive listening to your organization (via publicly available data like Glassdoor) can help guide your team to make decisions without specifically asking them in a survey. He also used a web scraper and demoed how easy it was to pull Glassdoor information and use natural language processing to see how employees talk about your company compared to others.

To ensure we also had time to talk about topics that weren’t presented on, we did an agile-inspired Lean Coffee (more like lean snacks, ‘cuz we had popcorn). This is a structured but agenda-less small group activity in which you make a kanban board within a small group and then vote on topics you want to talk about, then talk about them! We followed this up with a group working session about how we’d like to scale this day going forward.

All of my gratitude goes to the speakers for preparing amazing talks (with only a month’s notice, or a week if you’re Gary), and my fellow organizers Anthony, Alexander, Jeremiah, and Ryan. A special shoutout to Shannon Peterson who, although she couldn’t attend, sent a speaker and some awesome team members to represent her group. Huge thanks to the Gates Foundation and my director Tim who encouraged us to host this day as a way to convene like-minded individuals who are using data to change the workplace, and Summer Gibson for her assistance in scheduling and organizing the day. And lastly, thanks to all 50 individuals who took time out of their busy schedules to come create a community of people analytics peeps in Seattle.

[If you’re interested in being invited or speaking at the next Seattle People Analytics Forum, email me!]