What if you could automate data collection of employee behavioral, qualitative and performance in real time? Imagine the impact on employee satisfaction, best practice sharing and productivity. This is not the future—you can do this today. The possibilities are limited only by your organization’s willingness to embrace a new competitive paradigm.
The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers (February 2014, Penguin Group) masterfully lays out a roadmap towards this vision. Through first-hand experience and case studies, authors Leerom Segal, Aaron Goldstein, Jay Goldman and Rahaf Harfoush, demonstrate how data is currently being leveraged to achieve better outcomes. Think Big Data meets decision support inside your organization.
At the core of the book is the belief that talent is not only our greatest asset but also our greatest competitive advantage. This makes a ton of sense, especially in our dynamic healthcare industry where the market and competitors are unpredictable a few years down the road. Still, growth targets demand we must control what we can and optimize every single resource to reach our objectives. Remarkably, in our search for outcomes and results, we often overlook the most obvious and potentially best investment—our people.
The Decoded Company lays out a framework to structure our approach:
Technology as a Coach: Transform technology to engage, motivate, and train your people. Think hyper-personalization, from the training you really need, to the style of training that you learn best from, to sharing best practices as you’re facing similar issues in real time.
Data as a Sixth Sense: The ability to pair analytics with instincts to gain a perspective that’s grounded in data but tempered by experience. Remove personal bias, blind spots and knowledge gaps by providing contextual analytics in real time, yet at the same time, allowing the person to make the final, now well-informed decision.
Engineered Ecosystems: Provide quantitative feedback about behaviors, beliefs, attitudes and values that currently exist in your company. The opportunity for culture is to supercharge speed: Quantify, evaluate, correct or support, and monitor. Culture is treated as a living organism that can be leveraged for competitiveness.
I have to admit—at first pass this smelled like “Big Brother.” But as I read on, I was reminded that companies already have most, if not all, of our digital footprint. This data is not limited to digital communications—it’s tied to our credit cards, cameras and provided through our social networks. Clearly, laws protect our identities, but in a corporate environment where you use proprietary assets or leverage proprietary networks, you are creating valuable data that can be used to improve your organization’s competitiveness.
The book simply and smartly notes that these same technologies can be used positively to make our people and organizations better and provide a competitive edge.
