The Power of People - How Successful Organizations Use Workforce Analytics To Improve Business Performance

A practical, expert-informed guide to establishing, operating, and leading a workforce analytics function that uses people data to improve business performance.

The Power of People is the definitive practitioner's handbook for transforming HR from an intuition-driven, administrative function into an evidence-based, analytically powered driver of business value. Drawing on interviews with dozens of the world's leading workforce analytics practitioners, academics, and executives, the authors lay out a clear, repeatable approach to doing workforce analytics: framing business questions, building hypotheses, gathering and analyzing data, revealing insights, making recommendations, communicating through storytelling, and implementing and evaluating change. Through proprietary frameworks (the Eight Step Model for Purposeful Analytics, the Seven Forces of Demand, the Complexity-Impact Matrix, and the Six Skills for Success) and five detailed real-world case studies, the book shows how organizations can harness the latent power of their workforce data to predict outcomes, reduce attrition, grow sales, improve well-being, and increase profitability. If you want to build a workforce analytics capability that earns credibility and produces measurable impact, this book is your roadmap.

The model it argues

A causal-path model derived from the book asserting that design levers (analytics methodology, leadership, team skills, technology/data foundation, operating model, stakeholder engagement, storytelling) and contextual conditions (demand for analytics, analytical culture, resistance) shape psychological and behavioral states (analytical mindset, sponsor commitment, recommendation adoption) that produce outcomes (workforce outcomes such as retention/engagement and ultimately business performance).

Key ideas

Analytics Methodology Rigor: The extent to which workforce analytics projects are executed with disciplined adherence to a purposeful, end-to-end methodology that ensures clarity of purpose, sound research design, and actionable recommendations.
Analytics Leadership Capability: The competence of the workforce analytics leader to manage, challenge, integrate, and represent the team while exercising business acumen and key leadership attributes.
Team Skill Breadth (Six Skills for Success): The degree to which the analytics team possesses or can access the six core skill domains required for end-to-end workforce analytics success.
Data Quality and Governance: The fitness-for-purpose of workforce data and the strength of governance practices ensuring relevance, accuracy, currency, and ethical/legal handling.
Technology Enablement: The adequacy and fit of the workforce analytics technology stack to support the function's vision, mission, and project requirements.
Operating Model Maturity: The degree to which the function has aligned strategy, governance, decision processes, clear roles, disciplined project management, and accountability.
Stakeholder Engagement: The breadth and quality of the analytics team's relationships and communication with stakeholders it serves, depends upon, and impacts.
Project Sponsor Commitment: The active interest, resourcing, advocacy, and accountability provided by an influential sponsor across a project's lifecycle.