The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Miranda McKie. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Sarah
Hello, and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb, where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization. From hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce. We believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins. Welcome to our latest episode of Humans Beyond Resources. Today, Miranda McKee, product manager at Employee Cycle, whose vision is to change the way human resources see their workforce through data driven decisions, is joining me to discuss how leaders can use data to inform, measure, and gain buy in on your people related goals. Thanks for joining, Miranda. I’m really looking forward to the discussion.
Miranda
Me too. Thank you so much for having me today, Sarah.
Sarah
Wonderful. So I just want to dive into some questions perfect first, so will you start by sharing what Employee Cycle is and your particular passion for HR analytics?
Miranda
Yeah, for sure. So Employee Cycle is a SaaS based solution if you don’t know what SaaS means, simply software as a service. And essentially what we do is we bring together all of your people data. As you know, HR has a ton of different source systems, from your his to your ATS to performance evaluation, and they’re often stored in multiple different systems. And to really understand and get insights, you have to go to those different systems, download spreadsheets, evaluate, et cetera. What we do is we simplify that integration by bringing everything into employee cycle, which gives you a centralized source of truth of all of your employee data so that you can get essentially the insights much quicker and that you no longer have to deal with all of those messy spreadsheets to just generate a simple graph for insight.
Sarah
Yeah, that has me thinking back to all the Excels that I would manage and keep track of, retention data, attrition data, stuff like that, but having to kind of manually track it outside of the system. So, yeah, that tool is very useful. As an HR leader, why would you say it’s important to track HR analytics? And what type of HR data should I be tracking?
Miranda
Yeah, well, I always say, just like any other business domain, you need data to do your job. I mean, imagine if you were in finance and your CEO asked you for a report and you didn’t have any data to share, why you should maybe invest in different areas or even show and highlight how the business is doing. The same holds true for HR. And now with the use of technology and with the advancement in data and analytics, we now have the ability to start capturing really robust HR data to help make much more informed decisions. HR should be a data driven domain so important that we’re leveraging data to make, again, evidence based and fact based decisions. And in terms of where organizations can start to look in terms of what to track around data, it’s a hint in our title employee cycle, we always like to say start with your employee lifecycle. When you think about the entire journey of an employee, all the way from attraction and your recruitment metrics, all the way to offboarding and tracking
Miranda
KPIs and metrics associated to that. So again, you can understand what’s going on at different areas of the employees journey and really get a really strong pulse on your organization on where areas need improvement. Maybe you have challenges within your recruitment cycles, but not within your promotion. Or maybe there’s issues with turnover and not with learning and development. So by leveraging and using data, you can start to, again, make some more evidence based decisions and understand how to allocate your resources to really support the employee experience. Yeah.
Sarah
And do you have any examples from work you’ve done or groups you’ve supported where they started tracking some data and it really made a difference for them or they were able to understand something?
Miranda
Yeah, for sure. A simple one would be understanding turnover rate and going beyond just looking at turnover rate and the percentage of turnover over time, but diving into different kind of whether it’s maybe diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives by understanding intersectionality components. So, as an example, do women of color that are in marketing have a higher proportion to turning over leaving the organization than white men as an example, why is that happening? What’s going on in that area? So by now having access to that data, you can start to dive into some of those potential gaps that you may previously not have really been able to identify or easily identify on your own. So again, you can start making informed decisions. So again, tying back to that turnover example, if we know women of color are leaving our organization, maybe that would enable you to say, maybe we need to run focus groups or sessions with women of color to understand what those gaps and barriers are and how do we mitigate this issue.
Sarah
Yeah, I love that example because you may look at turnover as a whole and see, oh, it’s fine, everything is great. But as you look at the different intersections of the data, you can identify true problems to look into and resolve.
Miranda
Exactly. Awesome.
Sarah
So sometimes an organization’s data may not be shared as transparently as possible. And how would you recommend leaders track, share, and update their teams or external parties on their people related data? I know specifically, there’s been a big push externally at least, and internally to share your dei data and track and measure and have goals towards that. And so how would you recommend someone go from I’m doing nothing to I’m doing something and sharing this transparently?
Miranda
Yeah, great question. And it’s so tricky in HR because out of most organizations, it’s some of the most sensitive data that you’re dealing with. So you can’t just give access to everyone, but very personal data at times to employees. So it kind of ties back to your example, as you’re saying, kind of how do we share with stakeholders? And it’s really understanding what are the strategic priorities and the goals of those stakeholders and what are you trying to achieve. So where I’ve seen organizations do this very well is when they truly understand what does my CFO need to see and why. So, as an example, maybe they’re more interested in cost around headcount. So they want to see data related to turnover rates as an example, and looking at headcount across different locations and departments so they understand where spend is going and they may come to the HR department to do that. They don’t necessarily need to see all of your learning and development data unless there’s maybe some financial budget attached to it. Maybe you’re looking at your customer success or head of customer success, and they really care about sentiment or happiness of employees to make sure that they’re understanding, are my reps happy and serving customers the best way? So I need access to that different types of engagement data. So a long winded way to say it really depends on the different stakeholders that you want to involve. And it’s important that you’re not just giving them everything because it comes so overwhelming and it doesn’t necessarily add value. I’m sure you’ve seen those 25 to 30 different dashboards where you’re like, what am I even looking at? It’s important that we’re giving people KPIs or metrics that are really important to them, so that we’re enabling them with data to also make evidence based and fact based decisions. That’s a really important piece in terms of how you’re starting to kind of think about giving access and sharing data to different organizations. And yes, to your point as well, some organizations do release diversity, equity, and inclusion reports and things like that, which are phenomenal. But I always like to say it’s really great when you release those metrics and have that level of transparency, make sure you’re also following that up with key actions of what are you doing to address any of the gaps and then again aligning it back to your organization’s strategic priorities. So is diversity, equity and inclusion. I’m just giving this as an example, but part of your strategic objectives and something you’re trying to drive forward, or are you just really looking at the inclusion piece and there’s some key metrics there that you’re trying to drive forward. So it kind of all starts and really understanding your organizational goals and values and making sure all of those leaders are really aligned on those strategic priorities.
Sarah
Yeah, there are several things you said that I really liked and I wanted to highlight or amplify and understanding your audience. Right. So that’s key and not just giving everyone access to all the data, but making sure that you understand the stakeholders and what they want to see. And then I also liked how sharing data, it’s like the so what, what actions am I going to do with this? That type of thing. Because data without maybe some follow up action or something isn’t really that useful.
Miranda
Right, exactly. It just becomes another metric that no one knows how to action. And I find that with a lot of HR leaders now, that we have so much more access to data, and even when you compare it to five years ago, where we didn’t really have that much robust, even HR tech and systems. But now what I see in the industry is a lot of HR leaders are trying to get access to every kind of metric, which is great, but then they have no idea how to really action those metrics or what to do with all of that data. Sometimes starting off small and making sure you’re really understanding the purpose, like you would do with any other business objective or business case is so important to do. So that, again, that you’re always thinking about how am I driving value from the investment I’m also putting in to collect all of this data and analyze it.
Sarah
Yeah, that leads me kind of into my next question was if I am not doing anything today, but I want to start doing something. And you kind of mentioned this just a second ago, it’s just like maybe start small, but where would you recommend starting if I’m not tracking any data today or I’m very limited and what have you seen to be the most impactful items?
Miranda
Yeah, great question. So I’d say if you haven’t done this and you’re just really approaching this for the first time, I would say first step is starting with understanding. Again, what are those strategic objectives, where can I really add the most value? So do I think my organization maybe has a turnover problem? Right. Maybe I want to just start with a few key metrics there and then as you’re starting to kind of investigate that, that’s when you can go through what we call Hypotheses development. And that may sound intimidating, but it’s really not. It’s really where you’re just kind of saying, I wonder if women have a higher turnover rate than men. And you start to kind of ask yourselves those types of questions, which very comfortably and easily, or even maybe the better word is organically, helps you identify what key data points do you actually want to find and identify to prove or disprove your Hypotheses. And again, you can start small. It can start with a spreadsheet, although we all think spreadsheets suck, but it is a good place to start and starting again to then show other stakeholders within your organization the value of what you’re doing. So we always like to say get all the way from data collection to insight. So making sure that it’s not just here’s a fact but okay, here’s the actual insight. And this is how this insight is going to help drive change within the organization. And it can start with a couple.
Sarah
Of small metrics tying back to the business objectives. And I love the hypothesis. I’ve been using that a lot recently, and it makes me feel good. It’s like, I think this is what may be happening and then looking at the data and kind of determining whether that’s true. So I love that you pointed that out as well.
Miranda
Yeah, I agree. And I think we tend to see, especially being in HR, and if you’re not familiar with data, the first thought is, oh my gosh, it’s so scary. I was never trained on it, I don’t know anything about it. But when you kind of break it down into those just like simple questions you’re trying to ask, you’ll notice how much easier it becomes to start working with it, as opposed to being like, I need to be some data scientist or statistical analyst to be able to look at data. Which is just so not true.
Sarah
Yeah, it can be so overwhelming. Like, where do I start? But if you start with those questions, it makes it a lot easier to focus in on what you are trying to find. So thank you for sharing that. Yeah. So we’re coming to the end and I love to ask what final parting thought or idea or something you’d want listeners to go do today after they listen to our episode?
Miranda
Yeah, I would say a parting thought for listeners would be to start thinking about how they can easily or simply start to incorporate data into their everyday and try to move towards being more evidence based. So in HR, we historically have tend to be based on gut feel, right? Like, I think this will happen, but when we’re having those thoughts or we’re not using data to prove something, let’s try and think about how we could maybe access or get access to data to do that. And if you don’t have internal data available to you for whatever reason, even looking externally on what are some maybe interesting data sources that you can use to help to move to being more evidence based in the HR practice, that’s great.
Sarah
Well, thank you so much. This was super helpful and really just simplified for me the process of taking data, using it. And it’s really the same as any business objective or business area that you would be looking at, and we’re just applying it in the people space. So thank you.
Miranda
Exactly. Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah
Thank you for listening to this episode of Humans Beyond Resources. Visit Reverb people.com to find free resources, subscribe to our newsletter and connect with our team. If you haven’t already, subscribe to stay up to date on all of our upcoming episodes. We look forward to having you as. Part of our community.
