gestiónselección
septiembre 2019
formaciónnoviembre 2019
TRIBUNA
enero 2018
Big Data in Learning & Development: Challenges and Opportunities
,
de MERIT Summit
Big Data (BD) seems like a great match for Learning & Development (L&D) practices in organisations around the world. After all, it relates to the compilation and analysis of data sets most commonly related to human behaviour. By looking at a large amount of information gathered over extended periods of time, HR practitioners are able to identify patterns in human habits and interactions that can then be used to make razor-sharp decisions for sustainable staff improvement and satisfaction.The managing director of Daimler Benz claimed in 2017 that as computers are becoming more intelligent, they have started to deliver more precise and faster decisions than humans. IBM Watson already helps doctors in diagnosing cancer, four times more accurately than human doctors. There are companies who build a medical device (named after the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with your phone to take a retina scan, a blood sample, and a breath test and that will analyse 54 biomarkers to identify diseases. So in a few years world-class medical analysis will be widely accessible, nearly for free. Watson is also reported to deliver legal advice (so far for fairly basic matters) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. As these trends unfold will artificial intelligence soon replace HR decision makers?
However, others argue that there is no such thing as Big Data in HR. The idea that empirical methods can give an all-encompassing answer to big age-old HR questions is thoroughly rejected by authoritative sources like Harvard Business Review. HBR claims that Google’s Project Oxygen, a multi-year project that analyses people data and was poised to figure out what makes a good manager, has come to a conclusion that researchers had identified decades ago. Big Data’s role in HR, sceptics argue, is not one of acumen, but of analytics.
Where is the challenge?
Clearly, there is a debate about the pros and cons of applying Big Data to HR management.
Part of the reason may lie in change management at the area of disruptive digitalisation. Traditionally, change management has been at the forefront of digitalisation, but also its biggest obstacle, because it relies so heavily on the personal attributes of the manager, and the willingness of employees to follow through with their plan.
Professional services giant Deloitte is quick to point out that prior to embarking on a data-driven digital journey, change managers must align the entire organisation towards digitalisation and agree on the value it adds to the whole operation. Obviously this includes HR and L&D.
The use of Big Data opens up a world of possibilities for L&D departments, but it is also a substantial challenge, according to Learning Wire. Those challenges include the imperfection of current tools, the lack of human skill in analysing the data, and internal resistance to this sort of generalised data-based decision making.
And so it falls on leaders of all departments, change managers, and C-level executives alike, to tackle these challenges and turn them into opportunities.
What opportunities does Big Data present to L&D?
Challenges aside, there are some practices that have already taken root and have proven to work. All of them build upon existing HR methods, but also borrow heavily from other fields such as consumerism and marketing, which have benefited greatly from digitalisation.
Little Data
The routine measurement of things such as number of participants, courses, hours spent, costs, duration, participant reaction, and amount learned has long been analysed by L&D managers. However, the fact that this is not typically cross-referenced with other metrics leaves most L&D divisions with “little data” instead of “big data”.
Still, years of gathering this kind of information has allowed for the understanding of the impact of learning on employees. L&D departments nowadays are more aware of the impact of their work on overall productivity than divisions such as “talent acquisition” and “rewards”.
These practices should be continued but, more importantly, they could be used as a base to build on and expand Big Data analytics.
Employee-centric design
This has to do with designing L&D tools that cater to the employee, rather than the manager. It is a shift from so-called “instructional design” to “experience design”, phrases coined by senior Deloitte L&D analyst Josh Bersin. Experience design makes learning and information support easy and intuitive to use. It borrows from the IT term User Experience (UX), which puts ease and preference of use above all else. Designing apps, intranet resources and even non-digital tools with this philosophy in mind can be achieved via Big Data analytics by tracking the way employees use these instruments to learn.
According to Bersin, L&D managers can no longer see themselves as trainers or instructors:
“While instructional design continues to play a role, we now need L&D to focus on “experience design”, “design thinking”, the development of “employee journey maps”, and much more experimental, data-driven solutions in the flow of work.”
Data-driven content
The current L&D framework at companies around the world is similar to the way digital marketing is conducted. Guillermo Miranda, IBM’s Chief Learning Officer, describes it as being composed of various types of content, whose data on interactions and activities is meticulously collected and analysed. This data is then used to create intelligent systems to promote this content and monitor the way employees are using it in order to personalise it to their needs.
Big Data is at the centre of this approach, since it is able to track the preferences of employees with regard to the content they are receiving and the way they are processing it. By the way, Facebook uses a similar algorithm in its News Feed, and that has helped turn it into a multi-billion company.
Plan for L&D with Big Data in mind
Now that the challenges and opportunities have become a little clearer, the logical question would be “how to devise a strategy for L&D with Big Data in mind?”
“What most companies need is not more strategic analysis but a clear methodology to link strategic decisions, fast and cheap exploration of opportunities, and staged investment, and a radically different strategy to manage people, skills, training schemes, and internal digital platforms“ – Ricardo Perez, Professor of Information Systems, IE Business School.
When planning for BD-based L&D strategies, HRs must first answer a basic question: What data are we looking for?
The answer is threefold: how employees receive and perceive information; how employees behave and perform within the organisation; and how employees feel while at work.
Information consumption and perception
Around the globe, access to knowledge is just a click away already. Smartphones can be as cheap as USD 10 in Africa and Asia and trends are that by 2020 70% of all humans will own one. That means everyone will have the same access to world-class education. This development will enable all children around the world to access Khan Academy for everything children in First World countries learn at school, highlighted the Managing Director of Daimler Benz in 2017.
Since information is freely and widely available, learning materials such as guidelines, workshops, intranet, etc. can be obtained outside of traditional corporate learning resources, from sources such as social media, webinars, blogs, and others. Depending on company policies, materials from the latter sources can be consumed both while at work and outside of work hours. HRs must be certain as to what the information flow is and take that into account when planning for L&D practices.
The second part is understanding how employees perceive information: “Do employees process and remember information better when it is given to them by external or internal sources?” It could turn out that information delivered by authorities outside of the organisation has a bigger impact on employees. Big Data can also track whether employees act upon that information by signing up to said external webinars or interacting (sharing and replying) to said opinion leader social media posts. This has to do with the practice of Data-driven contentexplained earlier in this article.
By conducting company-wide surveys, or even electronically tracking employee activity at work, HRs can collect data on these information gathering and processing habits and analyse it in order to understand who the bigger authority is: the company or the outside world.
Employee behaviour
As already mentioned (see Little Data), data on factors such as employee performance and satisfaction, career growth and remuneration, as well as interdepartmental and personal communication has long since been gathered in one form or another by HR departments around the world. By streamlining the process of data gathering (by means of anonymous questionnaires and automated tracking software), HRs are able to compile, extrapolate and cross-reference huge streams of data that can identify correlations between these basic, but important factors and the role, place, and impact that corporate learning has on them. This is where Little Data becomes Big Data.
Employee wellbeing
Breakthroughs in technology have afforded us unprecedented access to health analytics. Wearables and other electronic gadgets are able to measure things like blood pressure, arterial pulse, heart rate, and blood glucose level. In one interview, Norman Kurtis, vice-vean of Behavioural & Human Development at IE School of Human Science & Technology, suggests that the data provided by these devices can optimise a whole range of things such as insurance premiums, sick days, and overall productivity. Lee Newman, dean of the IE School of Human Sciences & Technology, goes even further, suggesting that this data can measure willpower, self-control, and brain performance in real time. By gathering and analysing this data, HRs can devise an L&D strategy that boosts these metrics in order to help employees improve their own cognitive performance.
Execute and evaluate L&D based on Big Data
Experts agree that it is no longer enough to just implement a Learning Management System which hosts a catalogue of instructor-led, computer-based training modules.
“Learning is shifting to an environment of personalised, real-time coaching and reinforcement, and can even include the usage of virtual reality or gamification. Employees increasingly expect this level of service and experience and, particularly for technology companies that need to practise internally what they preach externally – it is a must for attracting and retaining key talent” – Vincent Turner, senior manager at Revel Consulting.
Once HRs have a clear understanding of where employees stand with regard to information processing, performance, and wellbeing, they are able execute an L&D strategy that is personalised and impactful. Depending on the analysis in the planning stage, HRs can segment and target groups of employees with different L&D tools. These can be both traditional (questionnaires, training courses, guest lectures, workshops, etc.) and digital (mobile apps, webinars, videos, VR/AR) in nature.
This is actually recommended, not only because it makes sense, but because it makes subsequent evaluation easier.
And since technology and HR are converging, HRs can borrow once again from the field of digital marketing and apply the so-called A/B testing method, where one L&D approach is tested against another in real time.
Here is an example: In addition to applying different L&D methods to different groups, take the biggest segment of employees with common traits and split it in two. Figure out a topic that is important to the organisation and provide one group with a written guideline and the other with a webinar. Then issue a questionnaire in order to compare the extent to which employees have processed and remembered the key points.
This will accomplish two things:
Here is where Big Data becomes truly indispensable. Ensuring that all the information collected during the execution stage is stored for further analysis allows for planning ahead in time. Once enough time has passed and enough data has been gathered, the time will come for the strategy’s next iteration. Analysing the data will provide answers to the following questions:
“Has the strategy succeeded in making an impact on the employees' overall knowledge and performance?”
“Has there been a change in the way employees process information, behave, and feel?”
“Are the L&D methods working?”
“Is the desired ROI being achieved or not?”
Conclusion
As technology becomes more advanced, L&D managers will be able to incorporate even more complicated tools in their strategies. However, it is important to remember that the employee is always at the centre of it all. Technology merely helps improve the results of human work.
“Using human analytics and behavioural measurement we can fine-tune the “how” we communicate and improve the outcome of our collective performance even more. Applying the right technologies helps organisations to grow in a fundamentally different way, from hiring, on-boarding, and sharing knowledge to succession planning. There are a number of innovative techniques that will fundamentally change tomorrow’s workplace” – Wim Focquet, HR and Talent Management, IE Business School.
Digital transformation is inevitable and so are the challenges that come with it, but if organisations embrace the change, they will gain a competitive edge that will ultimately cause them to emerge stronger.
However, others argue that there is no such thing as Big Data in HR. The idea that empirical methods can give an all-encompassing answer to big age-old HR questions is thoroughly rejected by authoritative sources like Harvard Business Review. HBR claims that Google’s Project Oxygen, a multi-year project that analyses people data and was poised to figure out what makes a good manager, has come to a conclusion that researchers had identified decades ago. Big Data’s role in HR, sceptics argue, is not one of acumen, but of analytics.
Where is the challenge?
Clearly, there is a debate about the pros and cons of applying Big Data to HR management.
Part of the reason may lie in change management at the area of disruptive digitalisation. Traditionally, change management has been at the forefront of digitalisation, but also its biggest obstacle, because it relies so heavily on the personal attributes of the manager, and the willingness of employees to follow through with their plan.
Professional services giant Deloitte is quick to point out that prior to embarking on a data-driven digital journey, change managers must align the entire organisation towards digitalisation and agree on the value it adds to the whole operation. Obviously this includes HR and L&D.
The use of Big Data opens up a world of possibilities for L&D departments, but it is also a substantial challenge, according to Learning Wire. Those challenges include the imperfection of current tools, the lack of human skill in analysing the data, and internal resistance to this sort of generalised data-based decision making.
And so it falls on leaders of all departments, change managers, and C-level executives alike, to tackle these challenges and turn them into opportunities.
What opportunities does Big Data present to L&D?
Challenges aside, there are some practices that have already taken root and have proven to work. All of them build upon existing HR methods, but also borrow heavily from other fields such as consumerism and marketing, which have benefited greatly from digitalisation.
Little Data
The routine measurement of things such as number of participants, courses, hours spent, costs, duration, participant reaction, and amount learned has long been analysed by L&D managers. However, the fact that this is not typically cross-referenced with other metrics leaves most L&D divisions with “little data” instead of “big data”.
Still, years of gathering this kind of information has allowed for the understanding of the impact of learning on employees. L&D departments nowadays are more aware of the impact of their work on overall productivity than divisions such as “talent acquisition” and “rewards”.
These practices should be continued but, more importantly, they could be used as a base to build on and expand Big Data analytics.
Employee-centric design
This has to do with designing L&D tools that cater to the employee, rather than the manager. It is a shift from so-called “instructional design” to “experience design”, phrases coined by senior Deloitte L&D analyst Josh Bersin. Experience design makes learning and information support easy and intuitive to use. It borrows from the IT term User Experience (UX), which puts ease and preference of use above all else. Designing apps, intranet resources and even non-digital tools with this philosophy in mind can be achieved via Big Data analytics by tracking the way employees use these instruments to learn.
According to Bersin, L&D managers can no longer see themselves as trainers or instructors:
“While instructional design continues to play a role, we now need L&D to focus on “experience design”, “design thinking”, the development of “employee journey maps”, and much more experimental, data-driven solutions in the flow of work.”
Data-driven content
The current L&D framework at companies around the world is similar to the way digital marketing is conducted. Guillermo Miranda, IBM’s Chief Learning Officer, describes it as being composed of various types of content, whose data on interactions and activities is meticulously collected and analysed. This data is then used to create intelligent systems to promote this content and monitor the way employees are using it in order to personalise it to their needs.
Big Data is at the centre of this approach, since it is able to track the preferences of employees with regard to the content they are receiving and the way they are processing it. By the way, Facebook uses a similar algorithm in its News Feed, and that has helped turn it into a multi-billion company.
Plan for L&D with Big Data in mind
Now that the challenges and opportunities have become a little clearer, the logical question would be “how to devise a strategy for L&D with Big Data in mind?”
“What most companies need is not more strategic analysis but a clear methodology to link strategic decisions, fast and cheap exploration of opportunities, and staged investment, and a radically different strategy to manage people, skills, training schemes, and internal digital platforms“ – Ricardo Perez, Professor of Information Systems, IE Business School.
When planning for BD-based L&D strategies, HRs must first answer a basic question: What data are we looking for?
The answer is threefold: how employees receive and perceive information; how employees behave and perform within the organisation; and how employees feel while at work.
Information consumption and perception
Around the globe, access to knowledge is just a click away already. Smartphones can be as cheap as USD 10 in Africa and Asia and trends are that by 2020 70% of all humans will own one. That means everyone will have the same access to world-class education. This development will enable all children around the world to access Khan Academy for everything children in First World countries learn at school, highlighted the Managing Director of Daimler Benz in 2017.
Since information is freely and widely available, learning materials such as guidelines, workshops, intranet, etc. can be obtained outside of traditional corporate learning resources, from sources such as social media, webinars, blogs, and others. Depending on company policies, materials from the latter sources can be consumed both while at work and outside of work hours. HRs must be certain as to what the information flow is and take that into account when planning for L&D practices.
The second part is understanding how employees perceive information: “Do employees process and remember information better when it is given to them by external or internal sources?” It could turn out that information delivered by authorities outside of the organisation has a bigger impact on employees. Big Data can also track whether employees act upon that information by signing up to said external webinars or interacting (sharing and replying) to said opinion leader social media posts. This has to do with the practice of Data-driven contentexplained earlier in this article.
By conducting company-wide surveys, or even electronically tracking employee activity at work, HRs can collect data on these information gathering and processing habits and analyse it in order to understand who the bigger authority is: the company or the outside world.
Employee behaviour
As already mentioned (see Little Data), data on factors such as employee performance and satisfaction, career growth and remuneration, as well as interdepartmental and personal communication has long since been gathered in one form or another by HR departments around the world. By streamlining the process of data gathering (by means of anonymous questionnaires and automated tracking software), HRs are able to compile, extrapolate and cross-reference huge streams of data that can identify correlations between these basic, but important factors and the role, place, and impact that corporate learning has on them. This is where Little Data becomes Big Data.
Employee wellbeing
Breakthroughs in technology have afforded us unprecedented access to health analytics. Wearables and other electronic gadgets are able to measure things like blood pressure, arterial pulse, heart rate, and blood glucose level. In one interview, Norman Kurtis, vice-vean of Behavioural & Human Development at IE School of Human Science & Technology, suggests that the data provided by these devices can optimise a whole range of things such as insurance premiums, sick days, and overall productivity. Lee Newman, dean of the IE School of Human Sciences & Technology, goes even further, suggesting that this data can measure willpower, self-control, and brain performance in real time. By gathering and analysing this data, HRs can devise an L&D strategy that boosts these metrics in order to help employees improve their own cognitive performance.
Execute and evaluate L&D based on Big Data
Experts agree that it is no longer enough to just implement a Learning Management System which hosts a catalogue of instructor-led, computer-based training modules.
“Learning is shifting to an environment of personalised, real-time coaching and reinforcement, and can even include the usage of virtual reality or gamification. Employees increasingly expect this level of service and experience and, particularly for technology companies that need to practise internally what they preach externally – it is a must for attracting and retaining key talent” – Vincent Turner, senior manager at Revel Consulting.
Once HRs have a clear understanding of where employees stand with regard to information processing, performance, and wellbeing, they are able execute an L&D strategy that is personalised and impactful. Depending on the analysis in the planning stage, HRs can segment and target groups of employees with different L&D tools. These can be both traditional (questionnaires, training courses, guest lectures, workshops, etc.) and digital (mobile apps, webinars, videos, VR/AR) in nature.
This is actually recommended, not only because it makes sense, but because it makes subsequent evaluation easier.
And since technology and HR are converging, HRs can borrow once again from the field of digital marketing and apply the so-called A/B testing method, where one L&D approach is tested against another in real time.
Here is an example: In addition to applying different L&D methods to different groups, take the biggest segment of employees with common traits and split it in two. Figure out a topic that is important to the organisation and provide one group with a written guideline and the other with a webinar. Then issue a questionnaire in order to compare the extent to which employees have processed and remembered the key points.
This will accomplish two things:
- It will test the validity of the original findings in the planning stage
- It will make planning for the next iteration of the L&D strategy easier
Here is where Big Data becomes truly indispensable. Ensuring that all the information collected during the execution stage is stored for further analysis allows for planning ahead in time. Once enough time has passed and enough data has been gathered, the time will come for the strategy’s next iteration. Analysing the data will provide answers to the following questions:
“Has the strategy succeeded in making an impact on the employees' overall knowledge and performance?”
“Has there been a change in the way employees process information, behave, and feel?”
“Are the L&D methods working?”
“Is the desired ROI being achieved or not?”
Conclusion
As technology becomes more advanced, L&D managers will be able to incorporate even more complicated tools in their strategies. However, it is important to remember that the employee is always at the centre of it all. Technology merely helps improve the results of human work.
“Using human analytics and behavioural measurement we can fine-tune the “how” we communicate and improve the outcome of our collective performance even more. Applying the right technologies helps organisations to grow in a fundamentally different way, from hiring, on-boarding, and sharing knowledge to succession planning. There are a number of innovative techniques that will fundamentally change tomorrow’s workplace” – Wim Focquet, HR and Talent Management, IE Business School.
Digital transformation is inevitable and so are the challenges that come with it, but if organisations embrace the change, they will gain a competitive edge that will ultimately cause them to emerge stronger.
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