Power to the People: Employees will control People Analytics market by 2020

At a recent Employee Experience Summit in Sydney, you could see the HR industry starting to adopt people-centred approaches drawn from retail, product marketing and design, with themes of choice, empathy, personalisation & design threaded through the two days. A great talk by Rhonda Brighton-Hall on block-chain & healthy use of technologies helped re-frame some concept work I did with colleagues earlier this year using human-centred design to explore what better workplace-HR apps looked like. I started Googling ‘block-chain HR’ that night but ended up pretty frustrated after finding useful but narrow ideas, such as CV & identity checks.

In our work earlier in the year we looked what services people were already 'buying' including LinkedIn, visual CVs and apps on their own phones. We added world-of-work insights such as Microsoft collaboration & work apps. Lastly we looked at niche insight 'apps' such as Deloittes Mass Career Customisation, new LinkedIn products and network analysis including MIT's sociometric badges.

Figure: Key ‘ingredients’ in people-centred analytics

We asked people to play What-if with these 'best of the best' ingredients and then to design their own products. The concept below is one example of what people wanted, in this instance their preferred Talent app: 

Figure: Profile of ‘Me’ combining personal & peer info, live work-activity insights & talent intel

Since doing this work it's become clearer just how much enterprise systems are lagging, over-reliant on insight from linear processes, often required to service 1980's process models that limit people insights to 'authorised' people. Similarly, innovative tech-offerings and niche insights that brindge this gap remain isolated & disparate, without an accessible, employee-centred app marketplace.

Our people told us they want this marketplace where they can pick best-of-breed insights from multiple domains to stitch together into a dynamically driven profile view, as their life and careers evolve. This open-source human tapestry would be designed for 'me', owned by 'me' and with configuration and choices that boost my ability to share and trade insight with my company and my peers.

Block-chain technology now delivers the capability build and share it as well as solve the complex ownership and sharing challenges. It's been a few years now since the rally cry “The war for talent is over. The talent won”. How come nobody has built the app-store for the victors yet?

Thanks and acknowledgements to a range of companies whose ideas and content are profiled above, including Resumup, Microsoft, Deloitte, LinkedIn, Trello, Harvard Business Review & MIT Human Dynamics.