Practical ONA, Survivor Analyses, ThinkTank Research and how Sports Data Scientists Measure Performa

Originally posted in 2019

The following is a blog from the London HR and People Analytics Meetup on 16 January 2019. If you are based in London and want to join the mailing list for these events, please click here. If you are looking for a meetup in your area, or want to share your community details, please click here for our Global Meetup Directory.

On the 16 January 2019, the London HR and People Analytics meetup community met at Runway East to eat pizza, have a drink and a chat - but also to hear from three speakers: @Kevin Metherell (People Analytics Innovation Lead @ Experian), @Andrea Schirru (People Analyst @ GSK) and Dr Stylianos Kampakis (@Stelios) (Sports and Social Media Data Scientist @ Brandtix).

The aim of our meetups is simple: to bring together a community diverse data experts (HR and non-HR alike), to share and inspire innovation from the grassroots HR and People analytics community in London. All recordings are available for free on the HR Analytics ThinkTank platform.

What is ONA? Practical examples of Organisational Network Analyses at Experian
ONA has been a hot topic for a while now, and everyone is familiar with the pretty visuals associated with it. In this presentation, we asked @Kevin Metherell to give a short and practical talk on ONA, sharing how Experian are really using it to make decisions, and (at least from my Q&A) to articulate what the data sets really look like.
 

Some of the key highlights:

• Diversity - They are able to use ONA to explore unconscious bias in different job paths and business areas
• Talent Management - They are able to combine ONA and talent data to 'crowdsource' untapped pockets of potential in the workforce
• Org Design and Social Capital - They were able to identify what capabilities and connections successful new teams need
• Well Being - Kevin gave some slightly expected uses of ONA in identifying who people "turn to for emotional support" to help train Mental Health First Aiders

To watch Kevin's whole presentation, please click here. Kevin is a long-term supporter of the HR Analytics ThinkTank too, presenting at the first meetup in 2016 and recording this webinar on predictive attrition modeling in 2017 (exclusive access for research participants).

Launching the HR Analytics ThinkTank research for 2019
We took the January meetup as an opportunity to launch the 2019 HR Analytics ThinkTank. For more information on the research, please click here but if you would like to help us analyse HR analytics, please register to take part in the research by completing this form.

What is a survivor analysis? The basics with GSK
After the networking break, @Andrea Schirru from GSK took us through his examples of conducting survivor analyses at GSK.

Some of the highlights:

• Andrea talked us through some of the basic principles of survivor analyses, how they were originally used by life-insurers, and help us to calculate the probability of if/when a state of change will occur across time. In this case, if/when an employee will leave the organisation.
• Basic survivor analyses are great to summarize time-to-event data (e.g. voluntary termination data), very common in HR, and can be applied also to small samples.
• By converting the metric to elapsed time (from calendar start/end dates), they were able to study if employees were likely to leave by certain work anniversaries across multiple cohorts within an early talent development programme (1st example) and compare cumulative retention rates across different groups (e.g. countries versus high-low performers) within a specific business unit (2nd example).
• They could use this to make better decisions about many aspects of the employee lifecycle, from training to retention.

To watch Andrea's presentation, please click here. Andrea is also a long-time member of the meetup community, so you can probably speak to him at one of the next sessions if you wish.

Measuring Potential, Performance and Social Media Commercial Success for Sports Stars
The final speaker of the evening was Dr Stylianos "@Stelios" Kampakis, a specialist in Sports and Social Media data science. We asked Stylianos to share some stories from his industry, in case it inspired us to think about HR analytics differently.

Stylianos gave an engaging and detailed talk, but for me, here were a few of the highlights:

• Performance measurement - Stylianos talked using shorter term discrete changes in performance to see how players get relatively better or worse, and how consistent they play
• Potential - Related to the above, he talked about combining off-and-on pitch data (sports and social media) to identify "good [commercial] bargains" which might be interesting in HR
• Employee Brand Value - His examples of using player social media brand measurements to determine commercial successes has some obvious links to how we measure the power of employer brands in attracting talent

To watch the full recording, please click here.

Want to find a meetup near you? Check out our meetup directory for existing groups or you can also join the the ThinkTank mailing list for general ThinkTank updates.

Check out these photos from the event: