How we built a people analytics capability for a fast growing organisation in a month
A few months ago, we grabbed the opportunity to combine organisational design capabilities with people analytics and data, in order to enable HR and Business Leaders to better manage, report, plan and track their headcount needs. Here we will share with you our own experience, learnings and outcomes of how we managed to build an MVP for a hyper growth company within a month, while avoiding any additional recurring costs — such as subscriptions fees.
💼 The Business Case
Before we start, let’s share some background information around the challenge and the organisation. What we had in our hands was the existing solution of headcount budgeting and reporting, as well as a strict deadline to optimise it (considering the start date of the new fiscal year). The current process was basically a set of excel sheets shared between divisions and HR, following a hierarchical approval flow.
Our job here was to find a way to optimise and visualise the headcount process from budgeting to fulfilment — for a rapid growth trajectory business — within a month.
When we say rapid growth, we mean a headcount growth rate of more than 50% and with 63 open positions at that moment. The business is present in 7 different countries, with more than 1k employees of 23 different nationalities. Imagine the transitional and organisational challenges that the HR department of such a fast growing organisation might face.
Finally, we had a structure of multiple management layers, which made the process and decision-making even more complicated.
🧑💻 How we approached the challenge
We started by evaluating the current state of the company, structure, resources, challenges, as well as stakeholder needs. What we needed here was a very fast launch of an easily implemented solution, which would automate and optimise the current process, while taking into account management levels, systems as well as the company’s governance model.
To start with, we discussed introducing a new system to the HR Department. However, this didn’t seem like the optimal solution at that moment. Why? Because the HR Team would move to a different Human Resources Information System (HRIS) in the next year, so we couldn’t risk purchasing a tool that would not integrate with the new one. Also, we didn’t want to add another new tool so fast and disrupt employee’s day-to-day lives without being 100% sure that this would generate the appropriate value.
Of course, in a larger scale project, it would make total sense to introduce a new system but, in this case, and due to the transitional state of the company, as well as limited time to go live, we decided to go with a different approach.
🚀 Our MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Our goal here was to design holistic data flows and provide valuable reporting and tracking mechanisms to key stakeholders that could be easily integrated with any tool moving forward. Therefore, we combined technology & analytics knowledge, with business understanding as well as People Ops know-how and concluded to our MVP:
Design and implement an infrastructure from scratch, built on Google sheets and visualised in Data Studio. This solution would provide HR Professionals as well as Team and Senior Leaders with a tailor-made mechanism of reporting, updating and keeping track of their team’s budgeted & unbudgeted requests throughout the fiscal year.
Our guiding principle was to enable and include all managers in this reporting process, while giving them decision-making power. As we were talking about a large and long-term process, with multiple management layers and reporting lines, we needed to enable Team Leaders and make them the starting point by giving them the freedom to fill in their own team requirements.
Process
After concluding our architecture, we built a process, visualised on miro, so that all key stakeholders could easily follow, understand and refer to at any given time. We followed a bottom-up approach for budgeting the positions. Simple infrastructure, using input and review files for teams, departments and divisions.
The thinking behind our architecture was based on the governance model of the organisation as well as privileges & rights per level. As mentioned previously, we wanted to give decision-making power to all team leaders independently of their level, as well as visibility where we wanted to.
In a glimpse, this is how our MVP would work. Team leaders per level (Team/Department/Division) add their position needs in the Input files, by completing just a few fields. Then, all these files are 100% automatically generated in the Review files accordingly per layer. At last, all Division Review files are gathered in one central automated file that lists all the positions, the so-called Total file. This file is the “brain” behind our dashboard, as it also gathers any new additions and matched arrivals to requirements (through a FIFO logic).
What about the budget? Positions are also inserted in a Budgeting file, where 1 person fills in the suggested pay levels for each position. The file makes use of a reference file that lists historical pay levels for each position, thus providing some direction.
Visualisation
Οur visualisation was built on a customised data studio dashboard, filled in by the total file. We created rates and calculated metrics/dimensions directly in the dashboard data source. We designed the dashboard based on the organisational needs, in order to project and visualise real time data and KPIs to Senior Executives & stakeholders.
💥 Business Outcomes
That was it! After launching our MVP, we were able to observe some of the positive outcomes that this solution brought to the organisation.
- To start with, it helped key stakeholders further automate the existing process by reducing manual work, time and effort spent, while providing them with a dashboard of real time analytics. This way, they were able to always keep track of the current and future planning needs, KPIs and targets just by accessing the dashboard at any time.
- Moving on, it enabled Business Leaders to make more confident decisions in the future, by relying on accurate, real time and properly visualised data whenever they needed. No more long presentations to update Executives, each division had their own customised dashboard, accessible and live at any time.
- On the other hand, the people ops team won the battle of not introducing another system to their employees at this transitional stage of the organisation. Considering the fact that people were starting to get tired of the frequent changes and the different tools that they had to add into their day to day, this solution brought minimal changes to end users whereas their experience was improved.
- Last but not least, with this solution we managed to minimise costs, as it came with no additional expense, licenses or subscriptions needed.
💡Before you go, here are some important principles to remember around our solution
Human Error — it is there, we can not ignore it and it is bound to happen. So, we should try to minimise it through proper training of all the key stakeholders.
Transparency is one thing — but access to information is a different one. We need to ensure that the correct level of information is available to those who need it.
Bird’s eye view — The higher we go, the less we need to know about each individual team. But, if or when required, we need to be able to reach there in 2 clicks.
Future integrations — Moving on, next steps have to do with integrating this mechanism with the HR systems and tools that the organisation will implement.
To sum it up, providing our stakeholders with proper & real time analytics dashboards, in order to make impactful decisions through actionable insights, does not have to be a painful process or an unaffordable option.
Τhere are several high quality systems out there that give solutions to our problems. However, since a decision like this should be properly evaluated before implemented, while taking into account all the different pillars that it will affect, we can work on alternatives until then.
Let’s ensure that we are smart and efficient when facing similar challenges, finding ways to design and implement low-cost solutions even internally, such as an MVP built and launched within a month.
