The building blocks of success: How The LEGO Group unlocked the power of its people data ecosystem

Be inspired by the people analytics approach that firmly interlocks HR data with business decisions

The business value of unlocking the power of your people data ecosystem (otherwise known as People Analytics maturity) for enterprise businesses is clear. As outlined in a recent IDC study, “organizations that do so will realize significant value for their organizations by;

• Increasing the overall performance levels and effectiveness of the work carried out by HR and TA professionals.
• Using insights and specialized data sets derived from analytics to both reduce employee turnover and improve HR and TA interactions with current and future employees.
• Improving business results by reducing time to market, lowering operational expenses and increasing revenue.”

They go on to explain that, “Having timely access to the right workforce metrics helps HR and the broader organization make the best business decisions to achieve their business objectives. There are limitless use cases for the deployment of analytics across the entire employee lifecycle.”

UNLEASH is thrilled to share this fireside chat between Melissa Kantor and Ian Cook as they share the story behind a real people analytics success story. As HR technology continues to transform, it’s business-critical that people analytics and data are factored in from the very beginning. Discover why you shouldn’t leave it until last and how it’s putting HR on the map within The LEGO Group – and other organizations worldwide.

Discover:

• The secrets to The LEGO Group’s people analytics success.
• The architecture behind this successful transformation and how people data and analytics systems connect with the rest of the organization’s data ecosystem.
• How you can advance your people analytics journey, starting tomorrow.

The distinguishing factor for getting results

Visier‘s experience of working with 1 in 3 Fortune 500 companies, provides evidence-based insights as to what works and what doesn’t as organizations consider rollout strategies for their people analytics solutions. Visier has found that, “A truly modern people-focused organization has the best of two worlds: the capacity to manage HR transactions with an HCM solution, and the capacity to answer more complex, strategic questions with a people analytics solution.” However, they’ve also found that, “when deciding which of the two should be implemented first, many leaders end up engaging in a cart-before-the-horse debate.”

In the case of The LEGO Group, Melissa and her team knew there was no point in waiting to implement their people analytics solution with their planned HCM overhaul. They realized from the offset that there was good information sitting in the business that could help with their business strategy, but they couldn’t get it out. For example, HR and Finance weren’t even aligned on overall headcount. During the session, we heard how The LEGO Group’s people analytics team was able to influence the next steps in the digital transformation journey by implementing Visier’s solution at the very beginning of the process, and not waiting for the HCM to be overhauled first.

Their reason for doing so included the following:

• It allowed them to understand what data they were capturing already and what they were not – i.e. where the holes in the business’ data quality were.
• It tooled them with the ability to craft the processes, new infrastructure and define the ‘new way’ of doing things, that would fix these gaps.
• It provided the opportunity to deliver value against business objectives, right from the offset, which in turn meant being set up to better productivity, agility, experience, and influence across the business earlier on.

Ian explained that it is efforts such as The LEGO Group’s, that distinguish those who get results and epitomizes not doing analytics for analytics sake, but implementing people analytics functionality with the intention to really make a difference to the business.

There’s no such thing as perfect data

One of the reasons why some organizations believe they can’t go about implementing people analytics functionality from the beginning is due to a “misconception of needing clean data beforehand and having it all in one place,” Ian shared. But, from Melissa’s perspective, as someone that has been down this journey many times, “There’s no such thing as perfect data.”

So many people chase perfect data. But, you just need good enough data. And that’s going to vary depending on what you want to do as an organization.

Melissa Kantor, VP of People Analytics and Insights at The LEGO Group

Ian followed by highlighting that success lies in knowing what data you have and being able to tell what data you need to collect, after implementation. He believes that this is a great indicator for whether integration has been successful or not, and not actually to do with the technology itself.

On the subject of data and providing results to the business, Melissa warned people analytics leaders not to get weighed down by questions where it’s hard to prove something one way or other. She used requests for insights on areas like whether training programs were resulting in promotions as one of these instances. Her answer is to try and look at 3 to 4 data points to provide confidence in causations and correlations. Additionally, helping people to understand the best measures to use for what they’re looking for, shows a level of maturity in a conversation and can aid the adoption of people analytics within the business. 

If you want a statistic to support any perspective you have, I can give it to you – if you want to find a piece of data to support anything you want, you can find it in your employee data. The challenge for us is to get people to look at data holistically, and not finding what they want to find.

Melissa Kantor, VP of People Analytics and Insights at The LEGO Group

One final insight to pull out from the webinar around data is The LEGO Group’s efforts to use Visier as their definition of truth. Instilling this one version of where all their people data insights come from, has provided a common approach across the business, and made waves in removing misinterpretation. In turn, this enables the democratization of data as systems are open and accessible.

Building the habit and getting buy-in

Melissa and the team at The LEGO Group have undoubtedly worked hard to create an analytical, data-driven mindset across the business. She spoke to having Visier as the foundation layer, that building the habit of using data across the business to drive decisions, has stemmed from. The maturity of this process is evident in The LEGO Group now having an array of savvy people partners throughout the organization that are logging into the system regularly, and either building their own analysis or asking for dashboards to be created – that are consuming information, whilst the people analytics team are doing the heavy lifting.

Remember that data to isolate cause and effect is often terrible. There is so much context around when value gets created, so people analytics leaders need to be able to triangulate. They should be asking “should you even look at this?”… They should then be able to say, “I can look at this, but this is why you won’t like it – because there’s 20 factors in the external world are impacting it…”  

Ian Cook, Vice President, People Analytics at Visier

However, throwing caution into the midst, Ian reminded the audience that “just because you’ve built the dashboard, doesn’t mean people will come to it.” Melissa explained that they tackled this potential scenario by building KPIs around whether people were logging in or not. They have also hosted drop-in sessions for those wanting to find out more about the system and what is achievable from it and working with Melissa’s team.

There’s also an important piece to the puzzle for getting business buy-in for people analytics, and that is to open the eyes of people partners and leaders as to what is able to be found out.  Explaining the capabilities of people analytics – that it’s not about HR performance metrics and measuring the work that HR has done, it’s about understanding and analyzing the workforce so that you can answer and contribute to business decisions and business outcomes.

If you enjoyed this session, please check out some more awesome insights from the Visier team, as well as from the likes of Olly Britnell, Global Head of People Strategy, Technology and Analytics, Experian here:

People data is a must-have, but how do you unlock its true potential? – NOW ON-DEMAND: Recorded on Thursday, December 9th, 2021

A masterclass to solving the problem of disconnected data – NOW ON-DEMAND: Recorded on Thursday, October 14th, 2021