The importance of People Success in Modern HR

Why we should be talking about People Success

A lot has happened in the years I’ve spent in HR. I’ll be honest, all those years back when I studied HR at the University in Borås, I wasn’t sold. I liked the idea of developing organizations, and people, but the entire field just felt too administrative and stale.

That’s also why I fell in love with recruitment. While the HR field felt slow, and boring, recruitment felt fast-paced, with room to innovate. That’s exactly what I did in my first years as well. Getting into a startup, I got exactly what I signed up for. Building, innovating, testing, iterating, and more than anything, failing. I fell in love. 

But throughout the years, I’ve slowly moved closer and closer to HR. Reluctantly at first, but lately with a burning passion to create change. In my, relatively, short time I’ve witnessed a transition in the way that organizations approach HR. Moving from the “human as resources” perspective, to understanding that the success lies in the people and culture. But the most impactful movements I’ve seen have been when we start taking inspiration from the departments and teams around us. 

Human Resources, with its roots in personnel administration growing with the industrialization in the early 20th century, is still a fairly new department, and we still have plenty to learn. Starting to view, and treat the People Experience as a product has been revolutionary for myself. Being able to take inspiration from Product Management principles, implementing design thinking, and a more iterative approach to building “people features” will do wonders for teams.

Why People Success Matters

If we decide to treat the people’s experience we are offering to employee’s as a product, we have to treat the employee’s as the customers. Now let’s look at the best in the business, when it comes to maximizing the success of customers. Enter Customer Success Managers. Understanding the success, and health, of customers requires us to look at their behavior data when using the product we are offering. How often are they logging in? How are they using the product? What value are they getting from it? How are they interacting with our help centers? This, and much more is the behavioral data that can tell us a story of the success of our customers.

So, how can this be translated into understanding the success of our employees?

Understanding the success of our employees requires us to stop looking at employee data in silos, and starting to look at it as an interconnected behavioural pattern that drives success. I’ll give you an example of two data points that are rarely connected.

Performance data

I tend to believe that performance is the result of a certain set of behaviors that drive business outcomes. These behaviors are major indications of how successful our employees are in their daily work. The problem is that the majority of organizations don’t have the ability, structure or processes to measure these nearly often enough to actually have the real-time data to make impactful decisions based on them.

Engagement data

Most of us know the importance of engagement to driving business results, and retaining talent. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report, 23% of the world’s employees are engaged at work. Meanwhile, a majority of the world’s employees, with nearly 6 in 10 employees, are quiet quitting, meaning they are psychologically disengaged from work. Now there are plenty of tools out there that help measure employee engagement. The problem here is once again in doing this in silo. Engagement and performance are strongly correlated, and only by having a holistic view of both data points, on a continuous basis can we pick up the nuances of how they proceed each other.

What are we doing at Asaya?

Now there is a lot more that goes into measuring the success of our employee’s, and while we are far from the level of Customer Success teams, we are on a mission to develop a powerful algorithmic approach to measuring, understanding, and acting on the success of employee’s. A tool that is able to give continuous data on behaviors that drive performance, key engagement metrics, and powerful sentiment data collected from a variety of employee interactions, we can give actionable insights, triggers, and alerts that put managers, and organizations in the position to act proactively, rather than reactively. 

The future of HR is exciting, and bright – we hope to help by providing a powerful tool that provides powerful People Analytics.