Another area where people analytics can be applied is employee experience. Typically, organisations have dealt with employee experience by way of annual surveys focused on job satisfaction or engagement. Although these elements are connected to work performance, the association is often minor (suggesting less than 20% overlap between engagement and productivity) and confounded with irrelevant aspects like individuals’ personalities. Another key drawback of these surveys is that waiting an entire year to understand shift in morale can be catastrophic, the fast-paced world demands a faster solution.

More frequent “pulse surveys” and employee listening tools have begun to gain traction in this area, and they may be swiftly leveraged to motivate actual action that benefits both employees and enterprises. Glint, CultureAmp, Qualtrics, and Peakon are all able to let firms “pulse” their workers on a regular basis in order to assess engagement and employee mood in real time. Employee listening has been around for a while, but in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, it has exploded in popularity. Employee listening is being used by companies including Rabobank, Merck, and National Australia Bank to learn how their workers are dealing with new remote working arrangements, how their support requirements are evolving, and what their preferences are for returning to work. Companies can gain valuable insights into what’s important to their employees in a rapidly changing environment by using techniques like stratified sampling (an alternative to random sampling that allows data scientists to partition a given sample into “strata” in order to make population predictions) and text analytics on free text comments (software that decodes words and word frequency into emotional sentiment or different psychological traits) and discussion boards. These also help avoid survey fatigue and preserve anonymity at an individual level.

An application of people analytics essentially critical to the current situation, is if new technology can be utilised to keep people safe by monitoring their mental and physical health. It is not just the usual measures, such as temperature checking or social distancing, that may help employers make their workplaces safe and ensure a healthy reopening of their offices in the post-lockdown phase. Companies are integrating new technologies in a variety of ways to benefit their staff. If employees opt to share their data, wearables may now measure stress and anxiety. Chatbots that may be used to inquire about your emotional condition and offer suggestions. Obviously, the same knowledge that may be used to help or control people: if you know how someone is feeling, what their physiological and psychological condition is, you can use that information to help and improve them, or (hopefully not) manipulate and control them. When technology allows other parties or persons to acquire insight into your deeper emotional states, it leaves one vulnerable.

Employers are looking to adopt “track and trace” applications, such as those produced by Google and Apple in the United States, which were quickly applied by various countries (e.g., China, Singapore, and Israel) in reaction to the outbreak. Academics are also collaborating with wearable start-ups, such as Oura ring and UCSF, to transform the biometric data that individuals are already freely giving into a Covid-19 risk profile. These advancements can be considered to be the digital equivalent of having one’s temperature taken on arriving at the office or having a doctor on call to check for important symptoms. While these measures are controversial given their potential to invade people’s anonymity and privacy, they are increasingly being adopted by organisations, and it is becoming harder to distinguish between those that are digital and those that are analogue or physical, as the lines between our physical and digital lives blur.

The Road Ahead