Ian Cook, vice president, of research and strategy at Visier Inc. has Broad experience in driving organizational growth working both as an external consultant and through internal leadership roles.

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Kevin McArdle, Director, of Enterprise Sales at Whatfix and Ian Cook on People Analytics and Traditional HR Practices – Bridging the Gap.

4:09 Why companies are separating people management from task management? And what role is that playing today?

• Driven by pressures, we're seeing organizations trying to rethink the role of a manager, It spans a bunch of different activities, and trying to put all of that onto one person, mostly in the software industry where people follow the agile methodology, organisations are switching to this approach where an individual runs the project or the daily flow of work
• And, the conversations around the relationship with the business, the compensation, Development, Opportunities, growth, durations, mentoring and the whole relationship element are handled by a different manager. Mostly, in cases where people are moving around a lot from project to project to task to task
• Businesses need to start thinking that way, management shouldn't be the only path to earning more money, but management skills should be valued for what they are. And recognising that, management is not doing more of what you're good at, it's doing something completely different

21:00 How can companies get better at gaining insights from what the employees are trying to tell them? And how does digital play a role in increasing the level of engagement? 

• We're in this wave three around the employee listening space, where some of our partner technologies do mass surveys, and they have an app where, after an experience, you can give it a star rating. After an experience, you can talk to your phone, they'll record that on a camera, they'll break that down into positive or negative sentiments, and they'll send that to the manager it belongs to
• With Digital learning, we don't have to have somebody push a button to send the survey, it can be triggered by an event. And you can have the technology process the answers, and give them to the people who need to understand them. So you're starting to be able to listen a lot more effectively and at a higher frequency
• An employer is not responsible for employee engagement, the employer can create the conditions through which you engage yourself. Now with some of the technologies that are available is this notion of aligning skills with tasks. A set of tasks can be offered and fulfilled by people with different skills, you can up somebody's engagement by giving them the choice to opt into new things to do. For me, if there's a way to make that more accessible to more people, without disrupting the business, that's one of the ways to help lift that connection to work for people

31:29 What areas of opportunity would be considered low-hanging fruit?

• The first step is to understand how people's data can be used to assist managers. This hasn't been a traditional practice. Over the last 10-15 years, a crew of people has built it up
• By educating yourself about what's possible, you'll be able to go far beyond what people think is possible. Here is how the experience level of your team has changed over the past quarter based on simple things as regular information feeds to managers
  
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