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Human Resource Graphs

  • What is an HR graph?
  • How can an HR graph help an organization?
  • Gathering data
  • Helping employees careers
  • Finding innovators
  • Looking for patterns in communication
  • Protecting assets
  • Case study: insider threat analysis
  • The ethics of HR graphs

What is an HR Graph?

In the November–December 2018 issue Harvard Business Review published a high-level overview of the role of analytics in managing human resources. Their article Better People Analytics Measure who they know, not just who they are showed that organizations that focused just on the attributes of an employee are losing out on key insights. They define People Analytics as using statistical insights from employee data to make talent management decisions.

The article gives six:

  1. Ideation - An employee signature
  2. Influence - An employee signature
  3. Efficiency - An team signature that can help predict if a team will finish projects on time
  4. Innovation - An team signature that shows if a team will be able to adopt new ideas
  5. Silos - An organization signature that shows whether an organization is isolated from other areas of a larger organization.
  6. Vulnerability - An employee signature that shows which employees the organization would be costly to replace

What data does it contain?

  • Organization chart data - what is the reporting structure of an organization?
  • Employee e-mails - who is sending e-mails to who and what are the topics of each e-mail?
  • Employee meetings - who is having meetings with who?
  • Project data - how are people grouped into working teams?
  • Task data - what tasks are assigned to what individuals?
  • Access data - what internal systems does each employee have access to?
  • Desktop application logs - what types of desktop applications do users use every day

How do you get the data?

Finding Innovators

Protecting Assets

Case Study: Insider Threat Analysis

The Ethics of HR Graphs

  • Informing employees of the data you are collecting
  • Protecting the HR graph
  • Transparency

References

  1. HRB: Better People Analytics Measure who they know, not just who they are by Paul Leonardi and Noshir Contractor