Getting to WHY with People Analytics

In this episode I’m joined by Max Blumberg, who is a visiting professor at Leeds University Business School. He’s a chartered psychologist and associate fellow of the British Psychological Society and he’s the founder of The Bloomberg Partnership, which is a top 50 analytics consultancy. The company delivers analytics and machine learning solutions to organisations like Nestlé, Lloyds Register, G.B. Group PLC, the BBC, Barclays Corporate and many others. Before this, Max worked as a management consultant at Accenture after which he successfully founded and exited a technology start-up. Max is a regular contributor to the global media and conference circuit.

The effect of human capital decisions on business outcomes by Max Blumberg:

The kinds of human capital decisions that we make in organisations are things about who should we have working for us? What is the best quality employee? What is the best training that we should deliver? How should we ensure that we have succession planning? How much should we pay these people? I could go on for hours and go through all the different things that traditionally an H.R. function does, but which arguably may be performed in other parts of the organisation. So, all of those are examples of decisions, what recruitment, what training, what succession planning, how much to pay, etc. If you get those decisions right, you’ll end up with the right kinds of quality people in your organisation – we call them workforce capabilities – which will give you the business outcomes that you are looking for. So quality human capital decisions about who you recruit, how you recruit them, how you train them, quality decisions lead to quality workforces which lead to quality business outcomes.

“A report you can dash out in a couple of hours. There’s no question that one of these projects for finding the root cause can be six months, a year or even two years. But whereas the report is likely to save you hundreds of thousands, maybe in the low millions, if you increase your productivity by 20 per cent or your sales by 20 per cent, you’re potentially talking about the hundreds of millions.” ~ Max Blumberg