Episode 115: How to Deliver Workforce Insights at Scale (Interview with Ampie Swanepoel and Werner Merbold)
On the show today, I am talking to Ampie Swanepoel, Head of Workforce Insights Value Management and Werner Merbold, Head of Workforce Insights at Standard Bank Group, we go on a journey to explore how they are successfully delivering workforce insights at scale. In this episode, we discuss the significance of empowering people leaders to become more data-driven, and how they went about gaining buy-in from the organisation to share workforce data to their people leaders.
In this episode, we discuss:
The shift from rear-view mirror reporting towards predictive workforce analytics
How the combination of a data driven chief human resources officer, a HR technology platform and a team of Meaningful Workforce Insights champions has helped Standard Bank Group deliver insights at scale
How they’re able to deliver insights at scale not just among HR, but across Standard Bank Group to empower business leaders
Ampie and Werner’s thoughts on how HR can add business value, as we start to come out of the pandemic
Support for this podcast comes from Visier. You can learn more by visiting https://www.visier.com/
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.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I'm delighted to welcome Ampie Swanepoel, Head of Workforce Insights Value Management, and Werner Merbold, Head of Workforce Insights at Standard Bank Group, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Ampie and Werner, it's great to have you on the show; thank you for joining us. Could you start, Werner please, by giving us a brief introduction both to Standard Bank and to your workforce analytics team, and where it sits within the bank and with regard to the HR function?
Werner Merbold: Sure, David. Thanks for having us. Just a little bit of context, Standard Bank is the largest bank by market capitalisation on the African Continent, which gives us approximately 50,000 employees across 27 countries. In terms of the structure, the workforce analytics team sits within the people and culture function, under the leadership of the Chief People Officer, who directly reports back into the CEO again. One of the strategic objectives of the people and culture function is to be data-driven and insight-led. This makes us quite fortunate that people analytics is seen as a critical capability by senior leadership in the organisation.
We have a fairly small team of about ten professionals at a group, people and culture level; but the investment in Visier, what we call the meaningful workforce insights initiative, was seen as central to shaping our workforce of the future.
David Green: Great, well thanks, Werner, that's some great scene-setting there, I think, and it's great to have both you and Ampie on. I think you're the first company we've had joining us in three years of the podcast that's based on the African Continent, so it's going to be great to learn how you're tackling workforce analytics down there in South Africa, on the same time zone as me as well!
Ampie, I know the bank used to have its own home-grown people analytics tools, and that you made the decision roughly three years ago to buy in a dashboarding platform instead. Before we get into the details of what you're currently doing, what prompted the decision to change, and what did you feel was lacking with the homegrown tools that you developed?
Ampie Swanepoel: Hello, David, and thank you for inviting us to share our journey with your audience today. Yes, although we were able to support the business at that stage, through the use of the additional BI solutions to provide people data and accurate reporting, we realised that we had to take a different approach to transform our capability to use data in a more strategic way. Our challenges centred around addressing three focus areas that hindered the workforce insights team from delivery optimal value.
Firstly, we were largely providing backwards-looking reporting, and that lacked the future-oriented focus to guide people decisions. We realised that the business decisions were being made on data that was largely in the past, as we referred it to as kind of rear-view mirror reporting. Furthermore, we needed a way to connect the dots across the HR value chain and identify drivers of so-called outcome metrics, across areas like employee engagement, turnover, productivity and diversity, in order to tell a more coherent story.
Secondly, we're quite limited in terms of providing visibility of workforce insights to line managers, and that prevented critical people decisions to be properly informed. Typically, we would provide monthly workforce reports to our human capital business partners, through using at that stage, QlikView, and the BPs would then spend time validating the reports and formatting them before they would actually forward them to their people leaders that they support. Now, this laborious and cumbersome process needed improvements to ensure business partners spent their time on more value-added tasks.
Thirdly, the inability to do workforce planning based on integrated people data at a more strategic level. We realised that we had to improve the ability to do scenario modelling and workforce planning, and this would really then help us to manage our staff costs more effectively, and to really understand what is required to set us up for future growth.
So I'd say, David, these were the main reasons for us investing in our meaningful workforce insights capability.
David Green: That's great, that's really good back story there, Ampie, and would it be fair to say that, for organisations out there that are thinking of even getting started, by actually developing some of those home-grown tools, what you did do is you created some more appetite and maybe some impetus that you could then build on and make the investment case for bringing in an external tool to support you with that; but that you identified that to provide the level of insights and to be able to scale them across the organisation, to your second point, to line managers, you needed to make that investment in a tool to support that?
Ampie Swanepoel: Yeah, I think it's so true, you know, you have to do the basics first. So, we had to really make sure we can actually get our data in one place. So, we started off building an HR data warehouse, and fundamental to that process was actually just to get organisational structure aligned. You would say that's actually such a simple thing, but actually for an organisation across so many countries that you have the right business structures in place, that also almost was a line between HR and finance, that was a real win for us when we got that right.
David Green: It's such an important step for so many organisations. Thanks, Ampie. So, Werner, you made the decision three years ago to make an investment. Can you explain the setup you now have in place, and what it gives you, the meaningful workforce insights initiative?
Werner Merbold: Two main things in place. Firstly, obviously the meaningful workforce insights technology platform, or the Visier platform, which provides, and I think I said it's the most important thing, a single view of all people data in the organisation, so everybody's on the same page; I think that's extremely important. It also allows us to deliver meaningful workforce insights at scale to multiple stakeholders, including the HR professionals, the people leaders, as well as other functions in the organisation, such as finance, risk, compliance teams and valid teams in the organisation.
Then, the second pillar is the people analytics team, consisting of our data scientists, our data visualisation and storytelling professionals, and they're responsible to support business with more complex analytical initiatives and ensure that new business questions that come can be answered. As we mentioned earlier, we have a small team in the people and culture level, but our partnership model with champions in the various countries, as well as business lines, allow us to extend our reach into the entire organisation.
David Green: What would be great to understand, Werner, is how does that interaction between the central team, as you said, of around ten professionals in group, people and culture, how do they interact with the champions, the meaningful workforce insights champions in the business? It would be good to get a sense of how that works.
Werner Merbold: Yeah, I mean we work extremely closely with these teams on the ground, almost on a daily basis. So, we form part of the EXCO teams, part of the MANCO teams; we sit in various decision-making forums together with them. It's obviously important to make sure that we train them well, that we set up learning paths, and during that process we identify people that really excel in reporting inside the business; they understand the business better than what we are, they are experts in their field.
So in some cases, especially if you're talking about something like the learning environment, it's highly complex, so we have to form these partnerships with them to be able to deliver quality analytics at the end of the day.
David Green: And, I guess it provides that nice link then between -- because obviously, you said one of the reasons why you wanted to do it, to invest in the technology in Visier, was because you wanted to scale some of these insights to managers in the business. So, the MWI champions, they kind of provide that link between the central team and the business, I guess, so it all flows together in a nice triangle of business champions and people analytics professionals?
Werner Merbold: Absolutely. I mean, you simply can't tackle something this big in such a large organisation across so many diverse aspects and topics without forming a very strong partnership.
David Green: Yeah, very good. Ampie, back to you. I know a really big driver, and we've talked about it already, where it was being able to deliver those insights at scale, and not just to HR either, but to as many line managers as possible. It seems quite a simple and very sensible ambition, but why was that so important to you; what drove that decision and what did you believe it would unlock for Standard Bank?
Ampie Swanepoel: As I've said earlier, David, I think one of the fundamental reasons for investing in this initiative was to deliver meaningful workforce insights at scale to the line managers. So, when we delivered what we call "meaningful workforce insights value management strategy", we really thought deeply of how to unlock the potential value of people analytics across the business.
We realised that the ultimate beneficiary of people data is not the HR organisation, but people leaders. We are basically responsible for leading the teams to the level on business goals and creating a positive people experience. So, in order to do this well, they need to be empowered to become more data-driven in their decision-making process.
Now, often these decisions need to be made in the moment, and therefore you cannot afford that HR business partners, or other centres of excellence leaders, become a bottleneck of providing access to relevant and timeless information. So, it's really key to have the business leader, or the people leader, as part of your strategy.
David Green: So, who decides what individual managers can see, both what they need to see, but what will help them benefit from the insights as well?
Werner Merbold: Such a good question, and probably one of the most difficult things that we tackled in rolling out this solution to the business. As Ampie mentioned, we need to get the data to the people leaders' heads. So, when it comes to access management or permission to people data, philosophy has always been to provide people leaders with full access to people data for their employees within their reporting hierarchy.
So typically, a line manager will have aggregate access to data for the business areas they form part of, and they will be able to see the detailed data only for the teams that they manage, for example performance ratings, employee demographics, leave and compensation information. As we roll out modules, we do consult what we call "centre of excellence leads" for the functional areas, such as reward or learning or performance management, where we decide exactly what access rights to give on every data subject.
When it comes to sensitive data elements, such as individual salary data, we will then seek ratification from, for instance, the people in culture team. As an example, we currently expose salary data only to senior people leaders. We also obviously apply restrictions to personal data, as governed by, for instance, the POPI Act.
David Green: Yeah, and I guess it's an ongoing process, because you're dealing with, from an external basis, different jurisdictions that you're operating obviously, as a global organisation; you've got new regulations coming into certain territories or certain countries all the time; so I guess you're continually having to review that situation?
Werner Merbold: Yes, absolutely. And as we roll out more modules, it obviously becomes more complex, because you merge these two different entities together. So, you might have performance data on the one side and compensation data on the other side; and now the question is, how can you add value by combining these two, and who should have access to that information? You can't just simply now, all of a sudden, expose that to the same people that had access to performance management data, as an example.
David Green: What is a complex situation becomes less complex by the fact that you're basically channelling all that information through one system?
Werner Merbold: Exactly. So, we built in parallel to that quite a complex permission-driven engine that we've linked into MWI, and that helps us to roll out the solution to everybody in the organisation.
David Green: And just to clarify for listeners, when you hear "MWI", that's the initiative that Standard Bank have: Meaningful Workforce Insights. I've learnt that during the last 15 or 20 minutes or so we've been talking!
So, Ampie, I know that people listening to this podcast, and know from the organisations that we're working with at Insight222 and speaking to as well, they would love their analytics or insights to be in front of as many line managers in their organisation as possible, and not to remain hidden away either within the people analytics team itself or HR. So, I guess a big question, and something I think would help listeners as well, how did you get the buy-in for this initiative in such a large organisation? Where do you start in getting the right people on board?
Ampie Swanepoel: So, yes, our value management framework and adoption drive was based on what we call "building a guiding coalition" amongst the various stakeholder groups. So, in our attempt to raise awareness and get the buy-in initially, we took some of the usual steps that will be familiar to many, like finding the right project sponsors, like you said; as Werner was also saying, we have those internal champions in place.
But I think what we really thought quite deeply about was to say, "Let's make sure we can segment our line manager community properly". We tried to understand the different personas and how they could benefit from people analytics. So, our line management community numbers around 9,500 people, and that's like 500 people managing large teams, 2,500 managing medium-sized teams, and then a further 6,500 managers that really are almost like team leaders of very small teams.
So, although people leaders have similar needs for data, it is important to understand that what is relevant for a Chief Executive of a large business or a county might not be important for a branch manager that's leading a small team. What we did is we created a bit of a rhythm where the meaningful workforce insight solution was first exposed to the HR community, to ensure they became familiar with the subject areas and metrics; so, we almost decided they should be really familiar before we take it to the line managers. But we didn't give them a lot of chance; we gave them a two-month head start.
Then we began a phase of communication and engagement with the line managers. This phase consisted basically of just getting them started, so the first thing was to just getting the managers registered on Visier, building awareness how to use the solution, whilst leaning on these embedded champions. But what we did is we constantly tracked usage among the various stakeholder groups, including the line managers. So, that was the first step.
Then, the other pillar was securing ongoing engagement. We really made use of a series of coordinated nudges. So, we tried to understand what are the topics that are hot, or really relevant for the line managers, and that could be around wellness, could be around leave management, that are really important from a business priority perspective. So, we also shared workforce insights which were very almost like basic success stories from the early adopters, with the line manager community, on a constant basis.
So, I think what we did realise is it's a constant marketing and selling approach that you need to have. It is not something that the line managers will just sit and wait to think, "We've got time now", and they now need to access the line manager solution. You really need to make sure that you are focusing on business priorities.
David Green: You raise a number of important points there, Ampie, I think, really important for listeners as they're looking to build people analytics in their own organisations. I think the first one is around marketing. There is an element that you can't just expect people to use things, you need to coach them, guide them, you need to segment it, as you have done, by looking at the different line managers as different groups there.
There's a huge piece around managing stakeholders. I mean, when Jonathan and I were writing the book, effective stakeholder management is one of the nine dimensions in our model. And if we think about the myriad different stakeholders that we manage in people analytics, from senior HR leaders through to C-level people on the board, but also some of the adjacent functions as well, such as finance, such as IT, works councils in certain countries as well; there's a whole myriad of stakeholders that we need to manage within people analytics.
Of course, one of those is the Chief People Officer, and to take -- does this kind of large-scale adoption only work if you have certain key figures convinced of its merits first? You're fortunate you have a very data-driven Chief People Officer in Standard Bank. Is it as simple as needing the right people to get on board first?
Ampie Swanepoel: Yeah, I would agree that pivotal to the success is the sponsorship of the initiative by the senior business leadership team; that is critical. In our case, it started when we were seeking approval to invest in the solution. Our Chief People Officer presented the business case, and the investment required, to the senior leadership team, and each of the executive leadership actually had to sign off on the initiative. So, they fully understood not only what the benefits were going to be, but also what were the costs involved and the investment required. And I think that's so important, that you get that right.
So, it certainly helps if you have the support of the senior leadership team, to ensure the people leaders down the line adopt people analytics. But I think we need, as I said earlier, to recognise that your line managers, or people leaders, have so many priorities to attend to, and it's unrealistic to think that it will be top of mind for them all the time. Therefore, one needs to ensure that the workforce insights provided to people leaders speak to the business priorities, and you need to support them in the moments that matter to them.
As an example, we recently used our meaningful workforce insights solution as a key enabler to support the business to prepare to return to the office. The organisation introduced a mandatory vaccination policy in December 2021, which required all employees to disclose their vaccination status by April 2022. The initial response to comply to this policy wasn't great. At the beginning of February, close to 30,000 of the workforce in South Africa did not yet declare their status or raise an objection. So, the workforce insights team identified this as a key opportunity to use people analytics to support the business in this challenge.
So, approximately 4,000 line managers were provided with a focused online analysis and nudges informing them who in their teams still had to upload their vaccination certificates or lodge objections; so, that was a huge task. And what the business decided is we are not going to drive this through the HR community, we are going to drive this through the business leaders. So, in just over six weeks, line managers, enabled by this focused people analytics solution, ensured that 99% of the workforce responded to the vaccination disclosure process.
This is just an example of a very successful deployment of people analytics and how it could be used as an enabler in the business.
David Green: Such a powerful example, because clearly it was a key business priority for the organisation to understand this, so they could actually, as you said, return to the office safely and within the guidelines as well; and a great way to get senior leaders onboard about the power of people analytics, a really powerful example, Ampie.
Werner, in the introduction, you talked about one of the reasons why you wanted to shift from the home-built solution that you'd made to the Visier solution, was to get away from just having rear-view reporting. So, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that shift between that rear-view reporting, and what you're trying to gain around more present data and predictive insights. Can the tech that you're using now help model future scenarios, for example?
Werner Merbold: I think predictive insights is probably the biggest ambition that we're striving for. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but we definitely have a few examples that I'll share with you, just to know we use this MWI solution to provide a more forward-looking view to business.
The first one was predicting resignations. I think, like most companies, we are seeing rising turnover rates, and particularly in specific specialised functions in the business. The fact that we have integrated employee data across the HR value chain within the single platform allows us to leverage the predictive capabilities within Visier to identify drivers and attributes linked to employee turnover. So, this allows us to obtain a view of how many employees are likely to resign over the next year.
Another example is cost optimisation. We are able to model cost optimisation scenarios based on certain business assumptions, across various dimensions, just by leveraging the workforce planning capability of our MWI solution. Some other examples are diversity planning, how we improve our female representation, and then things like impact of promotions, turnovers, hires, etc; just that influence the shape of the organisation.
David Green: And again, it's so good to have that tool in your toolbox, I guess; because ultimately, people analytics is about answering the most important business priorities that the organisation has. Sometimes, giving data that's current, or even sometimes past data, such as understanding where attrition could be a problem in your organisation, is important. But then it's great to have that capability that you can put predictive models in place to get people onto a page of what might happen, and what actions you can take to either prevent that, or make it happen, even more likely depending on what it is you're trying to predict.
So, Werner, obviously all that has a positive impact on the business. Let's talk about the impact on the business and the value to the business of investing in this data-driven approach of the meaningful workforce insights initiative that you have. Are you able yet to point to significant improvements or impacts on the business's overall health?
Werner Merbold: Yeah, we definitely can. I mean, examples that Ampie mentioned earlier as well, that's got a direct impact on the business. We could immediately see the change and the impact, for instance, on that COVID vaccination drive. It's still early days, but we see some encouraging signs. People metrics from part of the groupwide value drivers score card are now linked to remuneration plans of senior leaders. So, these metrics include things like agreed turnover, engagement, diversity, learning and productivity measure.
Over the last few years, we've seen a positive trend in, for instance, our EMPS scores, women representation at senior manager level, management of leave and employee wellbeing, and we attribute this to greater awareness of people metrics across the business, and providing leaders with visibility on how they track against the metrics.
For me, the most encouraging sign is the level of the questions that we're getting. Business are asking more and more pertinent questions, and they're becoming more and more data-driven in the way that they approach their business.
David Green: Yeah, as you say, that's a really good sign that this is landing well, and it's a journey, isn't it? The more work you do, the more powerful the questions you're trying to answer, the bigger the impact you're essentially going to have with people analytics in the organisation.
What would be great, this is a question we're asking everyone on this series, and I think, Werner, you're going to take this one. What do you believe to be the two to three areas that HR will really need to do well to add more business value, as we hopefully start to come out of the pandemic?
Werner Merbold: Top of mind is, I would say firstly, understanding what is required to optimally manage a hybrid working environment. I mean, the jury is still out on what the best approach is, but providing the leaders with data on how the teams work, how they collaborate, identify potential areas of burnout, for instance, and data on productivity levels is absolutely essentially to ensure that we can get back to work in an optimal way.
Secondly, I would say effective workforce planning is a key capability required by HR, the ability to model these scenarios that we spoke about, and allowing areas like finance and HR functions to collaborate in a more agile way, will become more and more important to ensure organisations can respond to an increasing competitive business environment.
David Green: Yeah, and I think to highlight the hybrid workpiece I think is really important. There's an argument, we're coming out hopefully of a sort of two-plus-year experiment around remote work; we're now moving, translating to an experiment around hybrid work and I think it will be fascinating. We're seeing a lot of organisations now deciding to bring workforce and workplace data together, so kind of understanding, in a hybrid environment, how a workplace is being used, and how should we maybe configure our workplaces to really drive things, such as collaboration and innovation, if that's what people are going to come together to do more often.
So, I think really good, and it would be great to have a conversation, maybe in 18 months' time, and understand what you found around the hybrid workplace. Werner, Ampie, thank you so much for being on the show, really enjoyed learning about your journey on meaningful workforce insights at Standard Bank. Can you, each of you, I'll start with you, Ampie; can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, find out more about your work? I'll come to you first, Ampie, and then, Werner, you can finish off.
Ampie Swanepoel: You're very welcome, David. I'm active on LinkedIn, so that's probably the best place to contact me. Also happy that you share my email address and that people contact me via that as well. So, very happy to do that and to learn from other organisations as well; we're very keen to collaborate.
David Green: And Werner, how can people stay in touch with you? Presumably LinkedIn as well?
Werner Merbold: Yeah, absolutely, the same way, LinkedIn; or, I prefer email. So, direct contact, they're more than welcome to contact me on email.
David Green: Werner, Ampie, it's been great to have you on the show. Thank you very much for sharing the Standard Bank journey with listeners of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, and hopefully at some point, I'll get down to South Africa and meet you both in person.
Werner Merbold: That will be fantastic, thank you so much for having us.
Ampie Swanepoel: Thank you very much.