A few years ago, I got a contact from Google head hunter. That time I was relatively new in leadership. After the initial contact, I decided to start gathering information both from Google way and from other sources, how a good company handles the management. For this goal, I was fortunate, because I found the excellent book of László Bock: Work rules!
I got two essential insights from the book:
The first is about culture. It doesn't matter what industry you are working in. It matters how you work. With the growth mindset and supporting culture, the workforce able to do great things. But as everywhere, the coin has two sides. If we give trust and the possibility to grow, we don't expect misuse. If somebody uses the given time for laziness and resting while others do their work, it is not tolerable.
And this is the main reason why command and control leadership formed. After several cases, the management lost its faith in the labor forces honor. For this situation, a direct consequence is the implementation of time tracking. I worked at a consulting company. I learned the time tracking pretty well! But how much parallelism between the tracked time and the truth. It depends on the honesty of the colleagues. If we don't trust, it leads to an unpleasant situation and begins poisoning everyone's mind. And here is how we arrive at the second insight!
László described pretty well the importance of the people analytics. I think it is an essential part of his work, as he founded Humu, who concentrates mainly on this field.
My personal insight into people analytics relies on two cornerstones. One is the group-oriented working method. My colleagues working in relatively small teams. Teams which able to understand everyone's work tasks in their group. They ready to decide who works in a proper way and who are the lazy ones. I hope they will not tolerate working instead of others, and as they are a mature person, they will tell the guy this is not the expected behavior! As they have the freedom to fire a colleague from their team, it is more strong control mechanism than any bonus deduction.
The second cornerstone is the people analytics. And here is how we arrive at the main topic of the article.
The second cornerstone is the people analytics. And here is how we arrive at the main topic of the article.
A few years ago, I made a Data scientist curriculum on Coursera. Finally, I earned a certificate for this course. That time, I only wanted to learn how Data science works, and now the time has come to use it. I think this is also the fact why programming skill is a must at Google. It doesn't matter which level you take on the hierarchy, you must prove your skills in any programing language.
I was thinking about how I can create statistics for my team without requiring new administration tasks. Because of the COV-19 situation, I work home, and because of this situation, I have an extra one hour, which regularly I spend traveling. At this time, I started to work out my statistical needs. Every team uses some administration tools for work administration. Like us also. From these tools, I can extract the daily activities. For every team and team member, I can create a daily overview of what they have done.
Many organizations use physical Kanban boards for this purpose. They put tickets, with photos of the colleagues to the team, but the physics limiting how much information we can write on the post-it notes. This is why I decided to write a digital system that does the same task. It is good to see the whole team together what they have done in the past week. If they have the owner mindset, they will be more energized from the amount of work they have done. As we are working in a transparent system, different teams able to compare their work with the other groups.
I think this is an excellent way of implementing servant leadership when we provide information to our team without requiring them extra administration. The teams must focus on their daily work, not on the demonstration of they are working. We made a great selection on the hiring process, and we voted trust in our colleagues. Implementation of administrative control is always messing the picture of faith.
With people analytics, I can fully use my creativity to find better analytics, which I can also apply for managing my team, without moving the colleagues focus from work to administration.