How Our View Of “People Data” Is Changing The Business World For The Better

4 key forces driving employee disengagement

No matter your company’s size, industry, or ambitions, the past year laid one truth bare: If you’re not taking care of your people, it will cost you.

Maybe you did more with less throughout 2020, still managing to hit revenue targets. Or perhaps your industry was among those that didn’t suffer financially, yet customer demand and the pace of business took their toll on your staff. 
 

You may not have paid the price during the Covid-induced recession, when workers were gun shy about leaving stable situations amid so much uncertainty. But employees are no longer “sheltering in a job.” Opportunities are out there once more, and if you’re not monitoring “people data,” you’ll lose good people to them. This isn’t some HR issue---it’s a business matter, and business leaders need to treat it as such. 

Otherwise, The Great Resignation is bound to bite you. 

What does ‘people data’ entail in 2021?

The discipline of talent optimization is all about aligning your business strategy with your people data. But what’s people data? 

We break it down into four distinct aptitudes:

●  Hiring top talent
●  Diagnosing employee engagement
●  Designing winning teams
●  Inspiring them to success

Hiring has become competitive again, as the economy rebounds and more companies are adopting remote-friendly models. You need a sound system in place, one that matches the behavioral traits you’d like to see in the role with a candidate who fits it. 

Savvy business leaders understand that a person’s resume shouldn’t automatically be weighed most heavily---in fact, when you prioritize the briefcase over the head and the heart, you do so at the detriment of your organization. Find the right behavioral and cultural fits for your team, and you’ll foster diversity of thought and background.

That’s not to say behavioral or cognitive assessments are cure-alls for your people problems. Rather, they constitute additional data points in your evaluation of a given candidate or employee, just like your interview notes and personal references. And any behavioral data on an individual should be taken into account within the context of the team they’re joining (and that team’s behavioral traits). 

The Forces Driving Disengagement

Competing for top talent also means fending off attrition. And if you haven’t taken care of your people over the past 16 months, well, you may see them hired off elsewhere in large numbers. 

Not taking care of your people doesn’t necessarily mean yelling at them or forcing them to work crazy hours. Rather, it can mean putting them in poor spots, neglecting their disengagement, and allowing resentment to fester. 

There are four key forces driving employee disengagement:

●  Job fit
●  Team fit
●  Culture fit
●  Manager fit

You couldn’t control the factors driving economic uncertainty during the Covid-19 pandemic any more than you could control the weather. But you can control the above, to varying degrees. It starts by monitoring the pulse of your people, perhaps at more frequent intervals when adversity strikes.

The 2021 State of Talent Optimization Report, which surveyed some 500+ executives in the wake of one of the most trying years in modern history, found that companies who monitored engagement more often in 2020 did so to their business’ benefit. These organizations weren’t immune to reductions in force, or economic losses, but they absorbed them at less severe rates overall. 

The lesson? Engaged employees are more likely to expend discretionary effort, leading to greater loyalty, resilience, and productivity.

The same report found that businesses are aligning their talent strategy with their business strategy at a 20% greater rate year-over-year. So the lesson is being applied more broadly. 

And that’s a net positive. As companies lean into behavioral data to gain a better sense of how their employees are wired, and how that affects team dynamics, we’ll be on a faster track to achieving our mission of Better Work, Better World. 

Mike Zani is the author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller, The Science of Dream Teams: How Talent Optimization Can Drive Engagement, Productivity, and Happiness and CEO of The Predictive Index.   Visit www.predictiveindex.com Connect Mike Zani Follow @predictiveindex