Episode 55: How Capital One Delivers Value at Scale with People Analytics (Interview with Guru Sethupathy)
Welcome to the final episode of series eleven of The Digital HR Leaders podcast. I first met today's podcast guest nearly four years ago, just before he embarked on his current role. I was hugely impressed. His background as an economist, his focus on delivering value and his sheer passion for the possibilities afforded by people analytics meant, I judged, that he had all the ingredients to be successful.
Today as Head of People Strategy and Analytics at Capital One, Guru Sethupathy presides over one of the leading people analytics functions in the world. During this, just shy of four year tenure, Guru has quadrupled the size of the team to around a hundred people and together with his team has delivered significant value to the business as well as Capital One's Associates. Guru is a deep thinker and has retained that passion for people analytics that I saw four years ago. I know that listeners will enjoy learning from Guru’s experience and vision for people analytics during the next 45 minutes or so.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
In our conversation Guru and I discuss:
The key milestones of how people analytics has been scaled at Capital One during Guru's tenure
How people analytics has supported Capital One and its associates during the pandemic
The steps that Capital One has taken to build a data driven culture across its HR function
How to scale people analytics by developing products that people will use
How well equipped HR functions have thrived during the crisis of 2020
How to turn insights from people analytics work into actions
The role of HR in helping to prepare organisations for hybrid ways of working
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in people analytics, employee experience and HR technology. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs and anyone in a people analytics, learning, HR tech or HR business partner role.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by orgvue . To learn more, visit https://www.orgvue.com/.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Guru Sethupathy, Head of People Strategy and Analytics at Capital One to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Welcome to the show Guru, it is fantastic to have you here. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to your background and your current role?
Guru Sethupathy: Hey, yeah I would be happy to. Good morning, David, I think afternoon for you.
Always a pleasure to chat with you on one of these topics, so thanks for having me. I have been at Capital One for three and a half years. I lead People Strategy and Analytics and obviously I think we will go more into the organisation and what we do in a few minutes. About my background a little bit, I have spent time in a variety of spaces. Previous to Capital One, I was a consultant at McKinsey and before that I was an academic economist. I think that is really the the early stages of my interest and passion in my career in human capital, that has evolved over the last decade. That is where it started was in academia and doing research on the workforce, on human capital, on skills and how globalisation and automation is affecting all of that, is where I got my initial starting point and that has landed me here.
David Green: I know, you will know as well from speaking to your peers, that you all come from quite different backgrounds and I am just wondering how your background as an economist actually helps you in your role?
Guru Sethupathy: Yeah, I think there is a couple of different ways. One, it got me really interested and passionate about the importance of this work. Some of my research that I did back then, it was just the importance of human capital. If you just step back for a second and ask about, hey, why are some countries richer than others? Just fundamental questions of economics, human capital is the one that keeps coming up over and over and over. The more educated, the more intelligent, the more productive and the more capable your workforce is, that is just going to correlate with all sorts of other wonderful outcomes from an economic and health and other perspectives, right? So it is just deeply, deeply, deeply important. And so then the question becomes, how do you achieve that as a country? And then how do you achieve that at local levels and state levels and communities and even companies? They all play a really important role. So human capital is fundamental, it is such an important question.
Then the other thing I realised is we don't know much about this topic actually, it is one of the most important things and we actually don't know what works and what doesn’t. How does hiring actually work and is that the right way it should work? How does internal functions of a company work in terms of productive output? How do teams function and how do people get promoted? The incentive structure and the performance and productivity and how these things are all interrelated. Why do people leave? What causes them to leave? How about career mobility and how do people evolve their skill sets over time? One of the really interesting insights, that seems obvious now, but that I had was most of our skill-set is actually learned on the job not in school and that gets more and more true as your career progresses, but we know so little about how do we evolve our career to progress our skills in the right way. How does an individual do that in a more thoughtful way and how might a leader or a company help their workforce do that in a more thoughtful way?
So there are just so many questions that you might even have, David, about your own career I might even have about mine, that we all have at the individual level but then also companies and countries have at the macro level.
There is just so much we don't know about something that is so deeply important. So a lot of that is what got me interested in this space.
And then the other thing that has been helpful is just a lot of the tools and techniques, regression modelling, statistical modelling, all of the technical tools that we have been able to bring into some of the work that we do at Capital One has also been quite useful.
David Green: So you brought this learning, this curiosity and this background in economics to Capital One just over three and a half years ago and under your leadership, the function has really scaled. I think it was around 25 people when you joined and you are around a hundred people now, which certainly from my experience of working with several organisations around the world makes you one of the largest and most advanced functions that I have seen. What have been some of the key milestones on this journey?
Guru Sethupathy: Good question. There are a couple that come to mind. Right off the bat, I talk about vertical integration. What is that? Vertical integration is the idea that, oftentimes I hear in companies that the people analytics function is actually separate from the reporting function, the consulting function, the strategy function and the data function. Right? And these are all different pieces and so people analytics might be just one of those pieces or two of those pieces. We are all of those pieces. And that is really, really important and if you want we can go in to why that is later, but that was an important step in our journey in terms of getting all of that vertically integrated.
The next kind of big milestone is really improving the quality of our data and the measurement of things that we care about. So again, we hired a lot of specialists, IO psychologists and other people who have a real specialisation in this degree, but also data folks, really to improve the quality of people data and HR data.
The next step was really moving on that journey to insights and products. Now that we have got the data in a good spot and our business leaders and HR partners really trust the data coming out of our shop, let's take it to the next level. How do we provide insights, how do we automate those insights and how do we distribute?
This is something I often talk about, how do we distribute those insights? What are the channels of distribution to get those insights out into the hands of decision makers?
Then the current phase that we are in right now, how do we now go to the next level, which is really strategy and changing systems and we can again talk about that later, I know you have some questions you want to ask there. But that has been our journey and those have been some of our key milestones.
David Green: Obviously it is a large team and I like the fact it has all of those pieces together, it just makes sense doesn't it. I am surprised more organisations don't do it really. How is the team structured at a high level?
Guru Sethupathy: Let me start with that vertical integration point, because I think that is key to the structure of the team. Basically my team owns everything from once data is entered into the HRIS systems, we take over and move the data, with our tech partners, to the cloud. And then my team owns the data infrastructure, the data models and the data governance and operations in the data warehouse in the cloud. So we own that. The benefit of having that within our team is then we have downstream analysts on our team who will work with the data, obviously, and they do insights and they do modelling and all of that stuff. But having them be on the same team allows for much more higher productivity of like, hey, a prioritisation of what the downstream data team is doing. Right. And so then you are not having friction of “Oh I wish that data went in the cloud first” or “why did you put this data in the cloud first?” You are not having that kind of friction and so the prioritisation of things get much, much more coordinated and seamless. So that has been a huge benefit to our analysts, to be all part of one team. Before they had to negotiate all of that and it was quite painful.
So then moving up, we have this data team, we also have a products team that is really responsible for taking this data and creating really useful data products. Descriptive products, but now we have moved into prescriptive and predictive products, so really starting to use machine learning in there, natural language processing and really generating automated insights. We have capabilities now where you can sign up into our product ecosystem and get actually automated information such as, Hey David do you know, for instance, the attrition rate in the last month in your organisation picked up quite a bit relative to previous quarters? So it is starting to get information like that automated and sent to you. So that is our product team.
Then we have a suite of consulting type teams, I would call it, that really are a combination of analysts and other experts using the data to draw insights and then make recommendations and consult with various lines of businesses. Shaping their talent strategy, whether that be diversity, whether that be workforce planning, whether that be any topic that you can imagine, really shaping the talent strategy for those teams.
And then we have an innovation team that is focused on multi-year projects, that might not have a direct customer today, but I think is going to transform the space two, three, four years out.
So that is the nature of our team.
David Green: Having it all together and all the various parts working together is one key learning. But what are some of the other key learnings for you on the journey?
Guru Sethupathy: One is around impact. There are so many cool things you can do in this space, David and we have talked about them and I think it is just fascinating because there is so much we don't know. This goes back to the earlier point I made, there is just so much we don't know, I feel like a kid at a candy store at times, like we could do this and we can do that and we can do this and you can do all of that. But I think being focused on the impact is just going to drive so much more buy-in from your CHRO, from your business partners, from other partners and so just always coming back to that, no matter how much you get distracted by this big, shiny object over there, this is something we always come back to. I think that has helped us accelerate in our journey. The second thing is that we can build out a lot of cool things, but people need to know how to use it. So it is a little bit of that startup mentality around product market fit. Are you building things that people will find really useful? It goes a little bit to impact, but it is even more than that and sometimes actually you have to educate your customers. I think we will talk about this later too but how is HR upskilling to leverage this thing that we felt and how are we helping them on that journey. But you can build all sorts of cool things, but if it's not the exact thing that solves the need for HR business partners then it is not going to be super helpful. However maybe we also have some insights and thinking “hey guys, you don't think that is helpful, but let me tell you why it is helpful and let me help you get there on that journey and take you to a different place”
So a little bit of back and forth, right? It is the old Steve Jobs line “People didn't know they wanted iPhones until we built it for them" you have got to have a little bit of that mentality as well and then help people get there and help people see your vision and meet you there.
So it is a little bit of a combination of be useful and do what people want and help them and then have impact. But also, how do you bring them along when you have a vision for something and you can try to get them to see your vision and build the skills in them to meet you halfway.
David Green: You talked about impact, usability, scale and value. It is interesting, we have recently conducted research at Insight222 on how to deliver value at scale with people analytics. We included 60 global organisations and interestingly one of the key findings was how our leading organisations are structuring their people analytics functions along similar lines to you actually, with consulting, product, obviously the technical, the data and the analyst, to focus on delivering business values.
What I am wondering is now, what are the main focus areas for people analytics at Capital One?
Guru Sethupathy: Let me hit on a few and see if this answers your question, if this is the right variety for you. So to your point, we first focus on just solving tactical needs. Early in our journey, 2017 into 2018, the mantra that I had for my team is, just be useful. Don’t sit there and tell them we have this flashy thing, it doesn't matter, just solve the thing that they need and let's just build that credibility and let's be useful. Now as we have shifted, we've built that credibility, we built the team, they trust us and we are really trusted partners. Now we can start to say, hey guys, this is what we think we should focus on. So here are the things that we are landing on that are going to be high priorities for us, sourcing and selection. At the end of the day, the talent that you hire is one of the most important decisions that a company makes, not just from a talent perspective but also from a business perspective. It is THE thing. Bringing in great talent that is going to have high potential in your company is incredible and I think the way companies hire is fundamentally broken, there are all sorts of problems that exist and also incentive problems and information problems, there is just often a mismatch and so on and so forth. So how do you actually transform that and how do we bring data, insights and technology to transform that hiring process? There is also a lot of amazing vendors in this space, so that is a huge area of priority for us. But then once they are here, that is only half the battle.
So the other big piece we are working on, two parts, one is around the fairness of our talent systems. This has been one of my passion areas, how do we use data, analytics, but then behavioural change to fundamentally make our talent systems, when I say talent systems I mean hiring, promotion and pay. How do we make these the fairest that are possible? The most fair systems that you can imagine, that really are about meritocracy and really enabling the best talent to succeed, helping everyone be their best and then connecting that to internal mobility. Because that is also important.
So these are two pieces; the post hire priorities, fair talent systems and internal mobility and how do you build an efficient internal marketplace? So topical standpoint, that is how we talk about our priorities going forward.
Then you have our products, that is going to be another area of prioritisation in terms of, what is the product ecosystem we are building? How do we democratise data insights, actionable insights, predictive insights etc? We have made a lot of progress there, but that is going to be a huge focus of our journey.
David Green: Are there any examples of any products that you built, that you can share with listeners?
Guru Sethupathy: I will give examples of a couple of things that I will talk about. One is, in our product space one of the things that we noticed is when people have talent conversations and we are talking about “Hey, how is Guru doing? How is he doing in this role? How is he doing compared to his peers? And how has he been doing relative to the last three years?” People just didn't have all of that information in one spot. So when people have a lot of talent conversations, we noticed there is some data and there is some evidence that they bring to the conversation, but there is also speculation in those conversations.
“Oh, wasn't Guru struggling three years ago, no that was two years ago, oh no, maybe that was four years or he has been great the last two years actually, because X, Y...” You start to see a lot of mythology start building into people's minds, around people, organisations etc. So our goal here was to have real time data in front of leaders and our HR partners as they are having these conversations. So an example of this is we have a tool called Workflow, that really allows you to see how a person's career has evolved over time. That is actually easier said than done, because you have to have the view of that person and all the different roles that they have been and see how their compensation might have changed over that time, how their role has changed over that time, how their levels have changed over the time, all their feedback, their ratings, who they reported to. So you have all the contextual knowledge to give you that really rich view of this person when you are talking about them, as opposed to speculating. The benefit of that is all the mythologies that creep into conversations, you can call them mythologies or call them biases they blur the line sometimes, but you can refute those in real time. You can say, no, that is actually not true, this is what happened. So the power of tools like that, and I gave you one example there about individuals, but you can also do that for organisations. So, David could say “Oh gosh, it has been really hard leading this team because, when I came in I had a bunch of low performers.” Actually, no David, you didn't look at this data. We have this in real time and you actually had some really talented folks.
So you can get away from all of these things that just take the conversations in all sorts of directions and really get to the heart of how are we are evaluating someone and what decisions are we making?
So I am really proud of the products we have created in that space to transform fundamentally how might you talk about talent and organisational decisions. So that is one category of example I would like to share with you. The other is very much in the selection space. So how do we build selection tools?
We are in the process of transforming our selection process and our interview process, our cases and also using technology to transform our top of the funnel. How do you automate the top of the funnel? What if we had a world where anybody in the world could apply and we had such an amazing tool at the top of the funnel, that it would narrow it down as opposed to saying, we are just going to go to 10, 15 Universities and find business majors or engineering majors from those 15 schools. To me, that is a transformative idea and so we are working on building out tools and products that will allow for that change.
So those are a couple of examples.
David Green: And certainly with the talent conversation one you can see it ticks one of your boxes around usability, straight away, because it is helping people in the flow of work, have those conversations. The one around selection, there is a lot of talk around how some of these things are unfair, but what could be fairer than actually opening up the funnel to more people and not just selecting those same Universities all the time. Also if you make that experience really good as well for people applying, you are also saving time so that you actually are interviewing the right people at the right time rather than early on. So yeah, I think clearly there are some big opportunities there. Just to come back on you, I like the way that you connect it with an internal marketplace as well because we know how important that is, not just for bringing the right people in but it is about helping them develop their careers within an organisation and tying silos such as learning and internal mobility together. Which I guess you can do with all the various things that you can connect together with analytics. So really good.
We are going to talk a little bit about the crises now, because I think there have been more than one this year, let's be perfectly honest about it. For those listening the episode is coming out in early 2021, we are recording right at the end of 2020 before Christmas.
So one of the features of the crises is that well equipped HR functions with strong capability and people analytics have almost been elevated even further by this crisis. Can you outline some of the ways that people analytics has helped support leaders, managers and employees at Capital One in 2020?
Guru Sethupathy: Yeah, I mean, 2020 has been a tremendous year for HR functions. You would know this better than me, David, given the seat that you sit in and all the people you talk to, but it is definitely true in my case and other peers that I have talked to, that just the role of HR has never been more important. And the role of the CHRO and the HR function and it is absolutely true at Capital One. I will give you some examples of the things that our team has been really integrated in, in helping HR and helping Capital One.
One is just around all the stuff related to Covid directly, right? The survey team has never been more impactful for Capital One, in terms of gauging how people are really feeling. And what is interesting is the power of the survey, there is a kind of an analogy with the polling in the country. Polling and surveys are really, really important because otherwise you only hear the loudest voices, you don't hear the most common voices. Because at various points, we have heard loud voices within our company on various things related to Covid policy and working from home and this and that. But then when we did the survey we realised, wait a second, that was just a small minority that was loud and actually the vast majority of people feel like this. So it has been just so helpful for setting the course of our strategy in terms of moving to work from home, how long should we be working from home, how might we stage or sequence or stagger a return to work policy for next year?
How might we think about remote work and I know we will talk about that in a little bit, how might we think about that going forward? So it has just been so tremendous to get the viewpoints and the richness of thought that people have around these topics in our workforce. So that has been a tremendous way that we have been really helpful.
Number two is the DIB space, diversity, inclusion and belonging. I think that has been another area that has just kind of risen to the forefront in a lot of ways, I think for a lot of companies, this has been a topic of interest but it has moved from a topic of interest at Capital One to a business priority. Not just a HR priority, but a business priority, David, and so that is a big deal. We have specific goals around this and our team has just been integrated because you can't achieve a lot of those things without looking at the data, looking at causal effects, looking at drivers, looking at where's the leverage and what do we need to go do and so on and so forth. So in terms of shaping that strategy and bringing data, insights and strategic problem solving to there, I think our team has been really a big part of that. The fairness of the talent systems is just like a cousin of that, so to speak, right? Because underlying all of that is, how do we make our talent systems as meritocratic and as fair as possible. So again, our team has been quite heavily involved there.
Then the other piece is we have been, as an HR function and as a company, have picked a couple areas to go deep from a talent systems perspective. The two that I highlighted for you are hiring and internal mobility. So our team again, is right in the thick of that in terms of bringing data, building tools, building products, to transform and create more of an open marketplaces and do better hiring. So just in terms of the things that are on the agenda, not just from an HR perspective but from a business perspective, our team has just been at the centre of it, unlike any previous year. If this had been 2017, I don't know if we would have had the capability or the strength to do all of these things. I feel this was like perfect timing and we were able to show up and help out.
David Green: I think what has been interesting in the crisis, a lot of things that were kind of seen as HR initiatives, diversity, inclusion, belonging being one of them, employee experience being another, employee wellbeing particularly I guess, have actually become business priorities. I think the great thing with analytics is we can show that a) we can help answer some of the questions that executives have got in that area, but b) we can actually start to prove that value by doing stuff and being good at it. That hopefully means that there will be business priorities beyond the pandemic and we will be in the future as well, because we know that happy, healthy employees and an inclusive culture actually helps drive business results, as well as being the right thing to do as well. I think that is where we can play a big role in people analytics.
I know we have known each other for a few years Guru and certainly early on in your time at Capital One we did an article together, on myHRfuture a couple of years ago. I know one of your big passions is about turning some of the insights from people analytics into actions and outcomes. I think we spoke at the time around how to drive behavioural change and how you can use nudges to support to do that.
So I would be interested now, a couple of years later, how you do drive behavioural change through people analytics? I know you have given a couple of examples already, but just to talk a bit specifically to that point.
Guru Sethupathy: So this is what I continue to be really excited about. I think that there is this tremendous potential here, but it continues to move slowly and I think in a purposeful way. I say that, not in a disappointed way, but a purposeful way. The reason I think it should move slowly is because there is so much we don't know, David, about behavioural change. There is a lot of research in academia around, how do you try to drive behavioural change?
Whether it is cognitive psychology, behavioural economics, whatever, people are starting to try a lot of these things in various situations. I think the education field in particular, there is a lot of research about, how do you get people to learn better, to learn more and to succeed in college? Like all of these things, I think being able to change could be powerful and it has had mixed results, just to be very honest. I think also in the wellness space, I think how do you get people to diet and how do you get people to eat better? That is another area and again, I don't know that one as much, but my understanding is that it has had mixed results. So I think being able to change is really, really hard and so I have actually purposefully wanted to move slowly on this because I think if you move too quickly, you can actually destroy value and destroy opportunity to do this again. If I was a CHRO and I saw someone come in and move too quickly and then it wasn't working, I would probably want to shut it down. So you want to be very thoughtful about how you proceed in this area. I am really excited to say again, we spent a lot of 2019 running pilots and really proving out, could there be something here? Sure it seems academic, it seems interesting, but let's actually tangibly show and run a few experiments, run some pilots. I am really positively happy to say we ran some pilots and there seems to be something there. Again we can't say conclusively because some of them had maybe a smaller sample size, we try to design perfect experiments, but the experiments aren't always perfect and so you have selection effects in terms of who is selecting into the pilot and so on. So it is hard to prove conclusively, but if you put the evidence together across those pilots, there does seem to be some evidence that if you nudge people in the right way, at the right time and with the right type of communications, you can actually drive some behavioural change. Now then, how do you move from that to sustaining that behavioural change? Because it is one thing to say, David became a better people leader, for three months, but we want to habituate that to, he is an incredible people leader for the rest of his life. How do you habituate that? So there is all sorts of complexities there that we are still working through. Our next goal is to really see if we can build out a platform, David, where we can run experiments constantly because again, there are multiple things here. We don't know, for instance, what type of communications is going to be more successful. Is something more personalised going to work or not because actually, the research is mixed on this. Sometimes when it is more personalised, you take it obviously more personally and so then you end up thinking, oh, I am getting this email and it is criticising me. You might actually have a negative reaction to that. Versus if it is general, maybe you don't take it so personally. But sometimes if it is general, it is less applicable to you. So there is all of these trade-offs. Also, what mode of technology are you responsive to? Would you prefer something in a Chrome extension? Would you like to get an email? Maybe you get too many emails and it would go to spam. Maybe you would like a Slack nudge, or maybe a text message? Then how frequently, maybe every day is going to be a nag, but once every quarter is not enough. So there is a lot of dimensions to this that we are starting to want to experiment and pilot. So part of that is building out a tech platform that allows us to run these experiments.
So that is where we are in our journey and investing in building that tech platform in 2021.
David Green: Sounds fascinating and then I suppose a hypothesis I might have is the more usable, back to your usability point, the better that is, the more likely you are to drive behaviour change. Particularly if you link it with the right communication channel and the right technology method of doing it as well. So I look forward to talking to you further about that in 2021, 2022.
We talked a little bit about this, but let's turn to our colleagues in HR. I know you have been heavily involved in this, but what are some of the steps that you have taken to improve data literacy amongst the wider HR community?
And what other steps potentially could you do moving forward?
Guru Sethupathy: I think we are doing three things and I think we could do all three of them better or more, going forward is how I am thinking about it. The first thing we are doing is we are exporting talent. There are folks on my team who are pretty solid on the data side, but they are also really, really have a real potential future in HR more broadly. I believe deeply, again we talked about this earlier, about people moving around in their careers and continuing to grow and develop. So I often have conversations with folks on my team and tell them, hey, you are a great analyst, but I think you could also be a great HR generalist, so let's move you into HR. That has the benefit of both growing their career but coming back to your question, now you are starting to grow HR as well. So it is a win-win, you are starting to bring that capability more generally into HR and then they could go amplify that in their new roles. That is like exporting that talent from my team into HR more broadly. Now, not every analyst on my team is going to be a great fit for HR, but I think there is quite a few that could be, so exporting that talent is one thing we do.
The next thing is really coaching and training sessions. We hold sessions around data literacy, around how to problem solve with data, how do you think about developing hypotheses, how you might use data to test those hypotheses and building a community of practice around it. Because again, I am not a believer in one-off training sessions, I just don't think they drive a tremendous amount of retention and learning, but then how do you sustain that going forward? I think building a community of practice around that or even incorporating interesting little nudges in the products that we have around, hey, did you think about small sample size? Did you think about selection effects before you do this analysis? There are ways of both incorporating it from a teaching perspective, but then a follow-up kind of reinforcement perspective. So I think we could do more of that in the new year.
Then the third thing is really top down David, and what I mean by that is working with the CHRO and his leaders to say, how do we set this as the expectation and the norm for our talent? Because at the end of the day, you could do this all day long, but then if you are not hearing that from above that this is the new norm and this is where HR is going and these are the expectations, your incentives are limited as an individual. So if you are reinforcing this training and this learning with also hearing that, hey, this is where we want to go as an HR organisation and this is where we want our talent to go. That combination is going to be more powerful.
So really working with Senior Executives in HR and saying, hey, look, this is the new talent profile of the future and we need to pull to that, is the third piece of the puzzle.
David Green: Yeah I really like that and certainly, we had Diane Gherson on a few months ago from IBM, there is 6,000 HR people at IBM and it is expected that they are comfortable and data literate. It is part of the job, part of being an HR professional. I love the stuff where you are saying that it is not just a training course it is continuous learning and it is being able to apply that, I guess isn't it. It is about applying that learning in your everyday work and then hopefully people see it and say actually, this is really helpful, this helps me in my conversations with the business. This helps me if I am working with a business to maybe develop some hypotheses that we can go back and the people analytics team can test it. So it is just making it part of the day-to-day that I think is really important.
I love that idea around a community of practice and certainly, if you pardon the pun, that is certainly a good practice that we are seeing in organisations that are doing that well in terms of raising that capability level.
Guru Sethupathy: I think it is a great way to demystify and de-intimidate it, right? Because this is not like rocket science and if you are doing it alone, it feels more intimidating or it feels like I can't learn this stuff. If you are doing it with peers and you are doing it all together on that journey, I think it makes it easier as well.
So I think it is a really wonderful thing.
David Green: In people analytics, we can learn a lot from our friends at HR anyway, because they are there at the coalface every day, working with the business and I think the more we understand their challenges, then the more that we can help them and they can help us, frankly, as well. So yeah, it is really, really good.
Let's look towards the future of the discipline, the future of people analytics. It could be the future of people management, if we want to expand it. What excites you most?
Guru Sethupathy: Let me actually and I don't know if this will directly answer your question, but this is actually what excites me the most about the future of people analytics.
There are two things and I will start with talking about business folks and then I will talk about people on the team. It is absolutely incredible when we can go take an insight or an idea that transforms how someone thinks about the decisions they make. I can't tell you the number of times I have had people being like, gosh, I didn't know HR could do this. I didn't know we had this kind of data and I didn't know we could draw kinds of insights and this has changed my thinking on this topic. That is incredible, it is literally incredible, right? That is kind of what you aspire to in this space. I just think as more and more people, business leaders, get exposed to this function and get to interact with this function, you just see the light bulbs click and see how it transforms their view around talent ,organisations, decisions that they make. That excites me. I think it is only going to grow because I think it is still only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the business folks who interact with the people analytics functions directly. When they get that interaction even more, it is going to open up a lot of eyes and possibilities. So that is one thing that excites me.
The other thing on the other side, is the talent. And this also excites me. I have had so many people where I've had interactions with or I am trying to hire someone or I am just trying to build a relationship, when I tell them about what we do and their eyes just go wide open. They will say, I didn't know a job like that existed. I didn't know a function like that existed. And it goes back to the point, I think there is a lot of really smart, talented people who are analytically savvy who haven't thought about HR as a career or even as a part of their journey, for a variety of reasons. When you tell them about a team like this and the type of work you do and their eyes are like, oh my gosh, I want to do this. So being able to help people have this be a part of their careers and entertain that as a possibility. I think that is also going to proliferate in the future as people analytics functions proliferate, as they grow and as more people get exposure to it. What an amazing way to transform someone's own career journey and say, hey, look, there is this possibility here and you should come work here and do this work. And they get excited by that.
So much of the work is so mission-oriented, which matters a lot for so many people, but they are able to combine their data savviness with mission-orientedness, with really interesting questions around people and systems. People get really excited about it. I love those conversations when I am able to get people excited about the work we do.
So those are the two things, it is probably not exactly the answer you might have expected, but those two things really excite me about the future.
David Green: It is your answer, Guru, so it is the right answer, it is good. It is a great perspective to hear. I share your excitement and it is great that so many people are coming into HR now because they are excited by what HR is doing and excited by the potential of people analytics. Analysts in other areas of the business are actually flooding into HR because they see, as you said, there is the mission around it, which maybe there isn't in other analytics functions.
So, that is the good stuff. What is your biggest concern about the field?
Guru Sethupathy: I think there are two. One is, I touched on this very briefly, but I do have a concern which is not driving to impact. Because there are so many cool shiny things, that you can do. I have a concern if parts of the field in general, I am not just talking about Capital One, but in general as a field, if we just start doing things that are cool but not impactful, do we then become just a fad? Then we are back to, not square zero necessarily, but square one. It becomes a thing where it was a big deal for 5, 10 years, but it didn't really change anything and then it kind of goes out of flavour. I don't want that to happen. I think there are tremendous possibilities here, but I do think that is why I am always so focused on impact because I don't want that to happen. So that is one concern I have.
The second one is both an optimism but also a concern, around data democratisation. And what I mean by that is, I came in thinking I wanted to democratise data. I came into this field and I have modified my stance a little bit and I will describe what I mean by that. I wanted to build products that anybody could access, no matter how savvy you are with regards to data, let's democratise data. Let's put it out there because more data is better and you can make better decisions with more data. What I am realising is not everyone is on that same level of sophistication of drawing inferences and in fact, if you just throw a lot of data at people, they could actually draw the wrong inferences and it is actually quite a skill, this is not shocking, to be able to draw the right inferences. So what is the right balance there? That balance is also more important in terms of thinking about data privacy and who gets to see what data and how do we protect the data of our associates? There are also regulatory things that are coming into all of this, California, CCPA, GDPR. So this intersection of regulatory but not betraying the trust of our associates, but also wanting to provide data and democratise it more. All of that is coming to like, how do we thread that needle? I feel like people can make mistakes on either side of that and so the thoughtfulness of that I think is something that we should take in to account.
David Green: Yes and I think, certainly in a lot of the organisations that we work with, they put in place things like ethics charters, obviously to govern who has access to data. What work that they are going to do, that there needs to be some value for the associates or the employees as well. I guess around democratisation, we need to help people to draw inference from data, particularly those that maybe are less savvy with it because it doesn't mean that they are not very senior in organisations and might take it the wrong way. So, yeah, I think I share your concerns about that because the field is developing so fast, it would be easy for the mistakes to be made and that could set us back. Just as not driving to impact and focusing on the cool, shiny things, rather than the things that actually add value. Because as you know, probably better than me, that it is not always the most sophisticated analytics that drive the biggest impact. So it is all about focusing on the outcome that you are trying to achieve rather than the cool analytics that could help you to get there.
Right, last couple of questions really. Certainly from someone who has come in to people analytics over the last three or four years and have obviously had a huge impact at Capital One. You don't get permission to grow the team the way you have, unless you are actually delivering impacts. I think that is a great credit to you and the team.
What are the key tips you would give to a people analytics leader or even a CHRO looking to scale people analytics in their company?
Guru Sethupathy: There are multiple phases to that I think and I am going to probably repeat a few themes that I have already shared with you. First, depending on what stage you are on this journey, if you are in the early stages, I would say start with the things that are the most interesting and important questions and then work backwards to the data. If diversity or talent management or hiring, pick your thing, start with the topic and the area that has most input. Then work backwards from there to then say, okay, let's build the data ecosystem around this. Let's go build the insights and so on and so forth. Don't just go build the entire system from scratch because that may be overkill.
So work backwards from, again, what is useful, what the impact is and so on and so forth. Once you have built out a couple of examples and proof points of value and impact then I think is when you are ready to really scale up.
That is when you want to probably have a step function change, in terms of the size of your team, the capabilities of your team etc and really want to build the underlying data infrastructure and the insights team that could really drive it. So I wouldn’t jump straight to that. I would just start with like, hey, let's build out a smaller team that is really doing the most important problem solving around the most important questions. Then once you have done that, you move to scaling it up in terms of the data and the product infrastructure.
So that is the way I would sequence it. I have seen examples where people have built too quickly, too fast and then you come back to some of the problems we talked about before of like, not knowing how to have impact and not knowing what to do with the data and all of that. Then you get setback and so I think sequencing that is probably something I would advise.
The other thing is really the partnership with HR is just so important, David. Really making HR feel like we are a true partner in this endeavour. It is not like some side shop and that we work directly with the business and we go around HR, we are a real partner with them and we are building that credibility, building the relationships with them. Understanding their needs so that we can have a great relationship where at different points, maybe HR is in the room with a business partner, maybe we are in the room. Maybe we are both in the room, but there is just a really good relationship and that we are really benefiting from each other's skillsets and building a better mouse trap here. I think that you don't want tension with HR and you don't want them to feel like this is taking away from their abilities in any way, or not allowing them to function the best way possible.
So I think really building that relationship and understanding where this function might sit in the organisation, how it might interact with HR in general, I think all of those pieces are really important as well.
David Green: Yes, people analytics and HR together are much stronger than separately. People analytics can help augment the value of HR. It is about managing those different stakeholders well, isn't it, I guess that is a real challenge for people I am seeing. Whether that be senior business stakeholders, HR, other functions like finance, so clearly we need to work with legal, IT, anyone that interacts with customers of course, so there is a lot of different stakeholders to keep happy with people analytics.
Guru Sethupathy: David, I think you bring up a really good word and you did, let's actually spend a second on the stakeholders. One of the things I look for in my senior leadership team are people who know how to manage stakeholders and manage across different interest groups, so to speak, and really influence senior executives. They will have teams that are doing the analytical work and so on and so forth, but for the leaders on my team, they have to be able to manage all of that because you are right, there are HR stakeholders and there are business stakeholders. There is legal, legal is a partner to us because of some of the work that we do, as you can imagine. Finance is a partner to us, so there is vast number of stakeholders here and it is really, really important to think through where those folks are coming from and how we really partner.
It is something we value in general at Capital One, but I think especially a function like this, that skillset becomes really important.
David Green: I love what you say about when you are maybe earlier in the journey, focus on the right work to deliver impact before you spend lots of time, effort and money, frankly, building the data infrastructure. Because once you have proved the value, it is a lot easier to get the budget to build the infrastructure and bring more people in, isn't it? So I see so many companies doing it the wrong way round and thinking that we can't do anything until we get our data infrastructure correct. If people take one thing away from this conversation, please let's take that away. Focus on delivering value in having impact. I think that is really important.
So this leads nicely on to the last question that we are asking all our guests on the show in this series.
What should HR leaders and please expand it to people analytics teams to, what should they do to help prepare their organisations for the future, where there will likely be an increase in remote and hybrid working?
Guru Sethupathy: Let me start with something tactical, but I think is super important and then we can move to a strategic answer. I think tactically, having a robust survey team is just paramount. When things are changing as quickly as they are in this environment and we are going into unknown areas, this year was an unknown David, just in terms of the pandemic and the speed at which change happened during the pandemic. Exponential growth and exponential change. I mean, a decision that you thought was preposterous as a CEO one week, might have been the norm the next week, literally. Right? And so at that rate of change, you really do want to stay closely connected to how your associates are feeling and hear from the voice of the associates. Even at Capital One, where we do quarterly surveys, quarterly was not enough this year. So much happened from quarter to quarter and so we instituted pulse surveys and more periodic surveys, touch points and focus groups. So building out a really robust capability to hear the voice of your associates is something I would just recommend, that I think was not only incredibly useful for us and other companies during this time but I think leaders will find that useful going forward in general because the pace of change in business is so fast. So that is one I would just kind of lead off with.
Now, if it we look more strategically, I think there is a lot of strategic considerations that we should think about as we maybe get out of the pandemic in 2021. One of the things we have noticed is during this year, we have actually been pretty productive. A lot of the knowledge workforce has actually been pretty productive, but our hypothesis is that that productivity is going to wear off. We think that it is going to wear off for two reasons, one is the intellectual vibrancy of working together in physical spaces, especially for the knowledge workforce, the ideas that are exchanged, the connections you make in the hallway that generate future conversations and future ideas. The ability to whiteboard and really scratch out new ideas, the ability to get context from people again, through random conversations, that is missing. And I think a lot of academic research has showed the importance of that in the knowledge workforce. So there is this intellectual thing and again, we have been able to paper over that for nine, ten months, but I don't think that is going to sustain itself.
Then there is the emotional connection. I just had a chat with a colleague today where he brought up a really interesting point of he is starting to feel like a lot of the connection that he built with the team over the last couple of years, is starting to wear off. This might be a little bit of, not a tremendous amount, but a little bit of trust that is being lost over time and people getting a little bit more curt with each other. Interactions being a little bit more transactional because you can just hit a button and that person has gone. Again, a bit hard but might be worth trying to measure some of these things such as loss of trust and so on and so forth. But even otherwise I think there's good reason to suspect this is the case.
So I say these two things to say, despite our view that productivity might not have taken a huge hit in 2020, I absolutely would not recommend a fully flexible workforce. If the CEO came to me and said what is your recommendation? I would say, absolutely not. When we are back to normal, I absolutely would not recommend a fully flexible workforce. That doesn't mean though, that we might not have to be a little bit more flexible and then does it mean that we might not have to think about what does remote actually mean? Remote means different things. Remote could mean, I am working from Wyoming, or it could mean I am working from Philly and I can get down to DC in two hours and I can do that every day. And those are vastly different things. Remote means different things for someone who is an individual contributor on a software engineering team versus a people leader who leads a team of 50 people. So I think we have to dig under remote flexibility for who, for when and really develop some principles around it. That is what I would recommend. Not just that is what I am going to recommend for our leaders, but also for anybody out there who is listening. It it really getting underneath this a bit and double-clicking, and triple clicking around some of these concepts and then developing a framework and set of principles that you feel comfortable with moving forward.
David Green: When you actually start thinking about it, it is actually really complex, isn't it? Because you have got to balance employee preferences with the work that the business requires to be done and then you might have two people in the same team doing very much the same role, but one of them can't wait to get back in the office because they like the office as a place for connection and everything else. Whereas someone else might be really happy about working from home four or five days a week. So it is really interesting. A lot of organisations have seen productivity go up from their remote workforce, if you want to call them that, but then look at the more innovative or more creative things, are we losing that? What about wellness? Because there is productivity does that just mean that people are working longer hours, how sustainable is that? So, yeah, there are so many questions that are still to be answered, I think.
Guru Sethupathy: Another dimension there is, how do you think about a new hire versus someone who is already in the company? Who needs connection more than a new hire, new hires really need to meet people and understand the context much more so than I might because I have already been here for three years and I have relationships etc. So there are so many different groups and subgroups and dimensions that you have to consider on this. I think blanket statements are not going to be helpful and really getting underneath it, is going to be the work that needs to get done.
David Green: Well it is going to be fascinating work for people analytics teams, all over the world, helping their organisations navigate through that.
Guru, it has been wonderful having you as a guest on the show, can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media? If you partake in that?
Guru Sethupathy: Yeah, absolutely. I am on LinkedIn and I am on Twitter, but on LinkedIn you can find me pretty easily Guru Sethupathy. I am happy to interact with people there and make connections and hopefully, hopefully fingers crossed, we will be seeing people and seeing each other in 2021 David.
David Green: Let's hope so. Initially I wasn't missing being on a plane, but I would quite like to go on a plane at the moment, maybe not now because it is a bit dark and cold, but certainly in the near future.
Guru Sethupathy: Absolutely. Look forward to it. Look forward to a brighter 2021 and really appreciate you having me on the show. I enjoyed our conversation as always.