As incredible new analytics emerge, can a people-centred approach help address privacy and ethics dilemmas facing many organisations, whilst sharing the benefits of ‘big data’ with the groups who generate that data?

A recent blog post by Joe Freed proposed the following idea:

“Build the value for the employee first, and the value for the company will follow”

To some this may seem like an idealistic notion. Companies are there purely to make money …aren’t they? A good company must focus on their core purpose (profit, service etc) but great companies always seem to do something more, both internally and in the world around them.

In the case of People Analytics, is it time to move past traditional, one-sided human-capital management analysis to a model that creates benefits for all parties involved? Like Microsoft’s MyAnalytics dashboards that focus more on personal productivity-insights and less on management reports, perhaps it’s time to democratise other analytics?

Amazing Insights in Everyday Places

Over the last 5 years, great new analytic insights have emerged about people: our working lives and activities, our wellbeing and how we relate to one another. Increasingly these insights into our real-life selves are found in our ‘digital exhaust’, the meta-data and information byproducts generated from our online activities and use of mobile devices.

Similar to the ways that miners re-process old material and ‘tailings’ for residual minerals, many of these new insights are mined from peronal devices as well as ‘everyday’ workplace systems such as emails, tweets and posts, collaboration tools, document libraries and public domain data.

Growing menu of Insights

Researchers and analysts have found some incredible applications for this data:

• predicting onset of mental illness, post-natal depression & heart-disease deaths,

• identiyfing suicide risk and prevention,

• tracking stress and predicting burnout,

• Identifying trigger-events for corporate collapses.

Yet despite this potential, few employers are exploring these new insights for the benefit of their teams, prefering to focus instead on known issues such as safety, pay-equity, compliance or fraud. This may be partly due to long-set business KPI’s or weak awareness of these technologies - however industry dialogue suggests this is more about the ethical dilemmas encountered in these new people analytics, especially those related to data privacy, trust & common-good.

Co-creating solutions that work for all parties

Many people are used to leaders making workplace decisions based largely on the interests of the company, rather than it’s people. I have worked with many good leaders who try to balance the two but most companies with a ‘people first’ motto, will regularly show that that people come a distant second ….to profit, productivity, compliance and customer. So when you play with data that matters to people, insights that may affect their future propects, reputation or standing in the company, just saying ‘trust me’ doesn’t cut it.

PRovided you have established some simple principles around trust and transparency, it’s usually easier to look at what specific trust model will work for each data-type or use. A great case of this is the use of sociometric badges to capture personal interactions. The success of MIT-startup Humayze is founded on a trust model of anonymous & aggregated data, freedom to opt-in for employees and binding confidentiality contracts. This help turn a potentially threatening ‘surveilance’ technology into a helpful product for the team.

This may seem like new territory for companies but most people are used to dealing with a variety of trust models via their experience as digital-customers, such as:

• Requested permissions prompts e.g. access to data by iOS apps

• Social validation models e.g. two-sided trust model in eBay transactions

• Personalised trust controls e.g. Facebook privacy settings

• Common-goal agreements e.g. Use of biometrics & activity data in sporting Apps

Exploring these trust models can seem quite complex at first but user-research can usually identify the key areas of value and risk/concern. The example below taken from a recent client engagement, kicked off a robust discussion between stakeholder groups and the project team on approrpiate use (and controls) for introducing a new technology in the organisation.

Holding these types of ‘social evaluations’ early in your program of work makes it much easier to future-proof your analytics and technology work, raising and addressing concerns early so you can build trust as you go. This is especially important for technologies that are sensitive, not well understood or linked to important decisions.

Trust is No Longer an ’Intangible’

Many industry comentators talk about the ‘currency’ of Trust and how it affects workplace change especially the success of new technology programs. Some like Josh Bersin have deconstructred the Dimension of Trust to help people work more tangibly with user- and employee- trust.

In the last decade, trust has moved from an intangible quality to something more concrete through various design tools and techniques capture the needs of people better. Also neuroscience research has quantified some components of Trust, such as safety and fairness, and their criticality as neuro-psychological conditions needed for healthy, effective teams.

So What Next?

It’s not hard to imagine companies that have co-designed practical trust models being able to deliver quite powerful insights for their teams, including the possibility for life-altering insights and life-saving referrals for people coming into crisis. In the mean time though I think that companies will first invest in a range of helpful technologies and insights that make people happier and more successful in their working lives day to day, such as:

• help teams to track their own mood and resilience,

• feedback loops for people on their daily communication style & online interactions,

• monitoring teams for genuine inclusion & isolation,

• identifying healthy and unhealthy patterns, both between and within teams,

• helping people at key points in their career like onboarding and enculturation.

Taking a people-centred approach to analytics and new technologies is a positive step in showing people your intent to creating helpful, benevolent technologies that they can absorb easily and with clear benefits to themselves and the organisation.

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Damien writes regularly about people at work and how we change. He is keen to create better Australian workplaces through his company RethinkHR. He has a passion for fresh new thinking, evidence-based practices and appealing designs and products.