According to a recent report from Culture Amp, it is the young, fast-growing companies of the New Tech scene that are leading the way when it comes to building engaging work places. New Tech employees are on average more positive about their companies than those in other industries, and are also more likely to recommend their company as a great place to work.
What are these culture-focused companies doing to make their employees so proud to work there? Can it be translated to all company cultures? Certainly, to a degree!
Here are four things all management teams can learn from New Tech and their penchant for making data-based people decisions known as people analytics.
Encourage Employee Development
Everyone wants to feel like their work is worthwhile, but since New Tech companies typically put innovation above all other considerations, employees themselves learn and develop their careers at a similarly rapid pace.
Although not every company will be able to structure themselves like this, most should be able to integrate some of the New Tech commitment to employee development: for example, by assigning regular new challenges to individual employees, or by allowing people to tackle a project of their own interest.
Facilitate Open Communication
Side projects and voluntary reassignments something Google refers to (somewhat whimsically) as 20% time are a great way to foster employee development. However, companies need to have a realistic dialog with employees before they commit to such projects to ensure they are mutually beneficial in the long-term.
What is most important is that management demonstrate that they care and are listening to what employees have to say. New Tech companies constantly seek feedback from their employees because they understand that the next big idea can come from anyone not just the HiPPO (i.e. the highest paid person in the room).
This feedback can come from a variety of data sources, like real-time employee engagement surveys and regular focus groups, as well as ad hoc analysis from a hands-on management team.
Leverage Employee Data
Another thing a lot of New Tech companies often do more successfully than others is collecting and managing employee data. This can prove invaluable when management need to make important decisions, related to such areas as resource allocation, employee productivity, and long-term retention.
No one working in the finance or marketing department would ever suggest a solution to a problem without charts and hard data in front of them, so why is this not the case with HR, where trust and relationships are still the main currency? New Tech companies tend to approach people-decisions with the same rigour they give to engineering decisions, taking intuition out of the equation and thus preparing management to make much smarter decisions.
People analytics software is hugely popular as it helps managers to gauge employee sentiment in real-time, and therefore nip issues in the bud as soon as they begin to arise.
Improve Recruitment and Retention with Algorithms
Analytics can also be applied affectively during the hire and firing process, and companies like IT consulting firm Wipro are soon to make it available to all HR departments. They are building people analytics frameworks that use algorithmic tools and programmes to predict whether an interview candidate will be a good hire, or whether they will simply leave after a few months.
Google already has its own successful data-based approach to recruitment (which is a combination of group interview scoring fed into an algorithm) and retention (again, an algorithm which predicts employee behaviour, and even allows solutions to be personalized). Data, rather than taking the human element out of HR, is here actually making humans much better at doing, and being happy in, their job.