Novel Intelligence – Stories

Welcome to our Metric Monday series. Each Monday, we’ll provide a cutting-edge or cool emerging metric that can help to improve your workforce analytics capability. These metrics have been vetted through real-world workforce planning and analytics projects, so the value has been shown in real business settings already.

Today, we’re going to look at three different ways of calculating tenure. Each tenure calculation represents a different look at the workforce, and they impact largely different outputs. We’ll look at each of these, their strengths, and where they should be applied for effective workforce planning and analytics.

For workforce analytics, tenure is not a one-size fits all.

The three types of tenure that we’ve seen used effectively, albeit in very different capacities, are:

• Service Tenure
• Company Tenure
• Role Tenure

It’s critically important to draw the distinction between the three, and use the right tenure metric for the right purpose.

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While those that work at McDonalds might have to sweat over an Orwellian vision of the future where they’re replaced by burger-flipping robots, the HR practitioner’s future is a little less bleak. While big data and analytics are becoming critical to business success, they’re never going to replace the intuition and institutional knowledge that your HR department has. The real power lies in coupling said intuition with the power of big data.

If you took an HRBP for a large division of an organization and showed them 100 graphs representing different data points around their workforce, around 75% of the time, you’re telling them something they already know. The other 25%, however, is where one can make powerful discoveries, as long as the interpreter of the data is willing to be flexible, which is the core value we’ll talk about today.

By no coincidence, these are also my company’s four core values. However, for this blog series, I’ll be relating them to the practitioner side. I’ll also be looking back at past projects and how each core value came into play, both in not-so-successful and very successful ventures.

Flexibility

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Welcome to our Metric Monday series. Each Monday, we’ll provide a cutting-edge or cool emerging metric that can help to improve your workforce analytics capability. These metrics have been vetted through real-world workforce planning and analytics projects, so the value has been shown in real business settings already.

Today we’ll look at turnover of what we call “SuperCritical” employees.

Cute superhero kids.. just because.

**Disclaimer: we don’t advocate hiring three year olds, however cost-effective it might be. We just Google image searched “superheroes” and thought it was adorable.

As we learn about people’s workforce analytics practices, a common theme is that they start with turnover. This is a very logical and valid place to start. It’s very easy, however, to get down into the weeds when analyzing turnover. It’s an easy trap to want to slice it by every potential view possible, to the point where you’ve got hundreds of of graphs and tables in your turnover report. If you’re presenting these to executives, most of them are “so what?” metrics.

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