by Nigel Rizzo
At the Risk and Resilience Festival on November 4th, 2021, there were many speakers that gave amazing presentations. One speaker, Aizhan Tursunbayeva, spoke about ‘People Analytics’ in an organisation and how it impacts the workforce.
First, one may ask, what is ‘People Analytics’, it can be defined as an area of Human Resource Management (HRM) practice, research and innovation concerned with the use of information technologies, descriptive and predictive data in an organisation. An organisation can either come up and analyse the workforce of its employees either in an innovative or enlightened way or an ethical minefield. Ethical Minefield is an area where the organisation only cares about numbers or how things are working. A innovative or enlightened organisation would see how is the employees handling their work and how can they receive a more engaged and helpful experience. The information just given gives a perspective on people analytics to understand the difference of different organisations and how they handle their employees and the workforce.
During the presentation, the speaker described data as always increasing where employers must collect data from outside of their organisation. In this case, this will allow the organisation to see also support their organisation to determine the areas that should be prioritise over others. Where they can collect data from outside their organisation is with Surveys, Online tracking, Social Media Monitoring, Online Marketing Analytics and more. These can have many risks to an organisation as the people who are working there might feel that they are giving to much of their private life to their work.
The risks for employees and the organisation with people analytics come in different forms. For employees, the risks with people analytics are discrimination, bias, threatening privacy or autonomy, psychological or social profiling, behaviour shaping, nudging, reducing performance, creating inconvenience and income insecurity. For the organisation, the risks with people analytics are financial risk, privacy concern, loyalty and motivation.
In order for the risks to become lower the speaker gave recommendations that can help. The recommendations are transparency and fairness, legal compliance, ethical guidelines, proportionality and protection, data rights and consent, inclusion of stakeholders, people skills and culture, evaluation, ethical business models. These recommendation are a few of her ideas to help reduce risk with people analytics.
For more information, contact Aizhan Tursunbayeva for any more questions on this topic. One can find her on Linkedin.
