02 Delivering Value at Scale

At The Viessmann Group, the CEO and CHRO came up with a scalable people analytics solution to tackle talent development. This is a challenge that is both top-down, because the business needs the right talent to execute on its strategy, and bottom-up, because individuals benefit from being in charge of their own careers. In 2020, we hypothesised that People Analytics as a function was becoming increasingly important to the business. We also hypothesised that this importance required a number of subsequent changes in the people analytics function.

Whilst no one would ever have wished for the Future of Work to be put to the test through the rapid global shift to remote work, the process of validating these hypotheses was enabled. Backed up by our research, we are able to validate the shift in people analytics towards a more businesscentric and sophisticated value proposition.

As a result of this shift, we propose viewing a people analytics function in terms of a value chain, guided by client drivers and resulting in business

Scaling People Analytics: A Case Study

The people analytics team established a scalable, analytically-driven and employee-centric competency model called ‘ViGrow’ that HR would develop, and employees would own.

Rather than rolling this out in a pilot phase, the team decided to go ‘big time’ quickly. It got sponsorship from the CEO and productised the solution to outcomes. Speaking about the scalable approach to People Analytics, Steffen Buch, Group Head of HR at Viessmann, emphasised the importance of stakeholder management, change management and communications in scaling people

implement it enterprise-wide at speed. analytics solutions. In order to roll out ViGrow, they focused equal amounts of time and energy building the solution and managing the implementation.

FIGURE 3 THE VALUE CHAIN EMPHASISES AN OUTSIDE-IN APPROACH

CLIENT DRIVERS

Business Strategy

Stakeholder Challenges

People & HR Strategy THE PEOPLE ANALYTICS FUNCTION

This model takes an ‘outside-in’ approach. The Client Drivers (on the lefthand side of Figure 3) include the business strategy, stakeholder challenges (i.e. challenges that you discern from having conversations with executive stakeholders) and the People & HR strategy. Instead of pondering questions like, ‘what’s my attrition rate?’ (understanding employee attrition has long been a staple exercise of people analytics teams) the function can change to examine more business-leading questions such as ‘what people factors will improve my business performance?’ and ‘which roles in my organisation deliver the most value?’

This outside-in approach empowers the function to focus on business challenges and driving business value; the experience that the workforce has; as well as broader topics such as how the workforce impacts customers and the community it serves. It will produce outcomes that are more helpful and impactful for the business (Business Outcomes).

The People Analytics Value Chain is described in more detail later in Section 4 (page 16).

Operating models that scale are better for business

As well as focusing on the value chain to maintain an outside-in perspective, a new way of working for people analytics also depends on

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Commercial Value

Employee Experience

Organisational Change

productising services and adopting a service-centric delivery model. People analytics functions often experience a tipping point. They shift from trying to find projects, to a tipping point when they don’t know how to get all of the proposed projects completed. The times before and after the tipping point are both critical, and require different areas of focus: before, the team is focused on building credibility, capability and infrastructure and after, the function must scale the most valuable and important analytics solutions quickly.

This means that as soon as a people analytics project is proven to deliver value (for example, an analytics algorithm that predicts who is likely to stay and leave an organisation), then it needs to be quickly converted into a product that can be delivered across the organisation. It is through this process that the product must be replicated and scaled across the enterprise. Further, each potential new product is ideally tested from the viewpoint of the user (e.g. employee, manager or business leader).

This type of shift has been underway in other areas of many customerfacing organisations since the dawn of the digital age. Consumer experiences are based around similar productisation models, reinforced with intuitive user interfaces and highly personalised experiences. People analytics is now on the same journey.