Creating Impact at Any Scale with Data-Driven HR featuring RJ Milnor

The Next Practices Weekly call series has become a well-attended and wide-ranging discussion for HR leaders each Thursday at 11am ET / 8am PT. On this week's call, i4cp Senior Research Analysts Katheryn Brekken and Tom Stone were joined by special guest RJ Milnor, Co-Chair of i4cp’s People Analytics Board, and Chief People Officer at Valuetainment. Here are some highlights from the call:

• Milnor's career started in finance, before shifting to HR and specifically people analytics. He was a PA leader at organizations such as Citrix, Equifax, Chevron, McKesson, and most recently Uber. He is now head of HR at a holding company that includes several fast-growing startups, including content company Valuetainment and the expert Q&A app Minnect.
• Very early in his career, during the age of the dot-com rise and bubble, Milnor became interested in the relationship between how we evaluate and value talent, and the connection with ultimate business outcomes.
• Milnor said that People Analytics functions essentially have two roles:
  • To serve the business by driving better business outcomes through the use of people data and insights.
  • To be the steward of the employees, that is, engaging with them and enabling them to thrive.
• Milnor also presented his perspective on the evolution of people analytics at many organizations, and as a profession in general. He said that People Analytics 1.0 was very focused on academic research (whitepapers, etc.). People Analytics 2.0 shifted to gathering more metrics and data, including going beyond what HR had always had about employees. People Analytics 3.0 is shifting towards how to use those metrics and data to best inform business decisions and drive action. At times this includes the "productization" of people analytics in order to scale the operation.
• Milnor shared an example of how he and his team at Uber studied productivity levels early during the pandemic period. They saw a big spike, especially among engineers, early during the COVID period in 2020. Then productivity began to oscillate during the return to office periods that followed. One reason they found for this was meeting volume -- managers in particular were often in 20 hours of meetings per week. They used a mixed-method study to better understand these meetings, and how people were collaborating more generally. Findings included:
  • Half of these meetings, or the time spent across meetings, was spent on basic status updates. Such updates could often be provided through other means (email, Slack updates, etc.)
  • Many meetings included far too many people, especially when decisions were being made--as not everyone really needed to be there or be involved at all. Instead, most often a maximum of 8 people were needed, and the meeting could be less than 30 minutes (because disengagement would increase when meetings were longer.)
  • Encouraging people to explicitly schedule focus time on their calendars (as long as three hour blocks), could improve productivity overall.
• Milnor noted that many organizations are trying to leverage people analytics data to drive employee productivity, engagement, and well-being -- all at the same time. A key question is: how do you push the dial on employee engagement, and have productivity and well-being improve at the same time? At Uber, they moved to a far more frequent (annual to quarterly and then monthly) listening program early during the pandemic. One goal was to determine how long can employees drive really hard, before they either burnout or start to disengage (or both).
• Milnor stressed the importance of data transparency about what data is being collected or tracked, and also why--otherwise employees will create stories that reflect their worst fears. For instance, tracking work activity data is done to help employees have more focus time, to be more productive, and to improve their well-being.
• In addition, it is also important for companies -- both large and small -- to have a documented data ethics charter. It should cover questions like how the organization is collecting and using data, how are they using experiments, what is the approach to data privacy, etc. This is important both for employees' comfort and peace of mind, but also for the CHRO, the people analytics team, and others in HR--because as questions and new ideas arise they can refer back to the established and documented people analytics ethical/governance charter.
• Regarding AI, Milnor said that generative AI can be very helpful regarding HR policies -- creating them, simplifying them, and using AI agents to provide Q&A support. AI also has great potential in the area of skills and workforce planning. Here it will be very helpful for scenario analysis, because AI's computing power can run scenarios on both the demand and supply sides far faster than previous methods. AI will also be helpful for identifying skills, skill adjacencies, and unseen skill possibilities from past experience, e.g., for non-degreed workers.
• Milnor warned about the possibilities of people analytics data being used in unintended (and negative) ways. A classic example is using predictive analytics to determine employees' risk of leaving. At an aggregate level, this data can be useful for workforce planning, etc. But at the individual level, it can be both helpful to a manager but also misused and lead to decisions that aren't in the best interest of the employee (e.g., not assigning them to projects, providing learning opportunities, etc.)
• When asked which core people analytics data should HR provide on a regular basis to the C-suite, Milnor said that  the standard HR metrics that are well-established remain important, such as various cuts of headcount data, hiring and attrition rates, engagement scores, etc. Increasingly important is data around internal mobility as a leading indicator of engagement and retention, and also psychological safety data as an indicator of engagement, trust, etc. He suggested that 80% of metrics will be common across all organizations, and the other 20% are likely very specific to each organization, what issues they are currently trying to solve, etc.

Links to resources shared on the call:

• Upcoming i4cp virtual events
• i4cp's Next Practices Now conference
• 2024 Conference Recordings (members only)
• Information on i4cp Membership
• i4cp’s new Team Network Effect report (full report for members only, non-members should download the executive brief)
• Connect with RJ Milnor on LinkedIn

To ensure open discussion, this event is exclusively for HR practitioners. Vendors and consultants are not permitted to attend.

This event is approved for certification credits.