If the title of this blog got you to start reading, I’m glad I didn’t call it “Solve business problems with data” (but we’ll get there soon enough). Post-Valentine’s Day, no doubt people everywhere committed to tie the knot. However according to the US Census, Valentine’s Day does not have a significant lead over other holidays for getting engaged. So we can have an intuitive hunch but can't make assumptions without checking the data.
How long does engagement last? Have you examined engagement levels and data in your organization lately? I’m talking about the passion people have for the work they do. As leaders we have a unique opportunity to arrange a marriage of passion and profits:
- Companies with highly engaged talent grew profits three times faster than their competitors.
- Highly engaged organizations have the potential to reduce staff turnover by 87% and improve performance by 20%. (Corporate Leadership Council)
- A 1% increase in employee commitment can lead to a monthly increase of 9% in sales. (IES)
- Companies with a highly engaged workforce improved operating income by 19.2% over a period of 12 months, whilst those companies with low engagement scores saw operating income decline by 32.7% over the same period. (Towers Watson)
- The amount of turnover employers with low engagement experience was 51% higher than their peers (Gallup).
- Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19. (Gallup).
Engagement can increase with tenure but segmenting your engagement data by tenure, performance, gender, race and location will tell you where your retention risks are, and where to scale leadership actions in areas where engagement is high.
WSJ article yesterday, “Decades on the Job Without a Sick Day,” listed numerous examples of individuals who prided themselves on never missing a day of work… is showing up old-fashioned in today’s world of working virtually? If your company is in the service business, customer experience is everything. So what drives the people with the best attendance record in your company? As a leader, how do you scale that? How do you leverage showing up and engagement to increase customer loyalty, referrals and repeat business?
First, identify the right business problem, and then look at snippets of data to tell a compelling story. Had a great catch-up conversation with webcast presenter, Jeff Higgins, an expert in analytics, about his article The Top Five Metrics for Workforce Analytics. Jeff pointed out a new hot job (something workforce planners do as part of environmental scanning for strategic talent supplies)... in both business and the world of human capital the emerging hot job is called Data Scientist.
According to Michael O’Connell, senior director of analytics of TIBCO Spotfire, in a Forbes interview, “When you approach a business problem, don’t just start bringing in data and start looking at data; that’s valuable, but only after you have some sort of problem defined that creates value for the business.” O’Connell offers the example of turnover in the telemarketing industry (the problem); the data reveals that more than two dropped calls a day begins to affect talent tenure. Then use the data to tell the story with action plan recommendations to predict better outcomes. Dan Woods, CTO and editor of CITO Research, says, “The critical decisions lie in determining which snippets of information that surface represent the tails of whales and which are red herrings.”
Sometimes you have to, as they say at Nike, “Just do it”- or as philosopher and historian Michel Foucault once said, “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do one thing now.” Make the one thing the right thing, use your business intuition and insight, and see what the data tells you about which actions make business impact.
photo courtesy of MattyTurner