HR Development Programs

1. Analytics Skills

It’s one thing to recognize an analytics skills gap in HR. But when it comes time to closing it, many organizations feel overwhelmed and powerless, throwing up their hands and sometimes insisting that there is simply no talent to be had. We offer a different approach, one that begins with the people you already have. As we’ve highlighted elsewhere, successful analytics projects come down to just two things: domain knowledge and analytic techniques.

What many businesses fail to understand is that foundational analytics capabilities are actually easier to develop than domain knowledge. If you are looking to grow your in-house HR analytics capabilities, we can provide core training to your current HR team a get you off the ground in weeks.

When you start with your own people who already know your business, know your culture, and know HR, they’ll be working with data they already know and addressing problems they see every day. This eliminates the barrier of abstraction that often intimidates and hinders new analytics learners. Meeting your HR team where they are at helps them link concepts to outcomes and keeps them engaged, encouraged, and learning throughout.

Topics covered in our program include the following:

• Basic data acquisition and cleaning
• Foundational statistics
• Data reshaping and summaries
• Core HR metrics (e.g. turnover, quality of hire, internal hire rate)
• Data visualization
• Integrated reporting and analysis

We also use 100% free, 100% open-source software so the tools and cognitive skills are 100% portable to any part of the organization.

Yes, it will take some time, effort, and individual dedication. But the basic skill set is absolutely within the reach of your current HR teams and the payoff is huge.

2. Internal survey design and analysis

Understanding your organization means getting the pulse of your your workforce, where it stands, what it thinks, and how its changing. But doing this systematically is beyond the means of most companies and HR teams. The available solutions in the broader market are too expensive, too cookie-cutter, and ill-suited to an organization’s specific state, culture, and goals.

We can help you create custom, empirically sound survey instruments that address your specific issues, guide you through workplace change, and inform leader decision-making. Whether it’s employee engagement, shifting remote work needs, or retention and development issues, we provide an engaged, accessible, empirically sound approach to asking and answering the key questions that drive your workforce and your business.

3. Systematic Hiring

Hiring is the single most important activity of any business. Put “the right people in the right seats” and revenue grows, business expands, and employees thrive. Yet, the quality and consistency of hiring at most organizations is varied at best. The problem is that the hiring process changes from candidate to candidate, even for the same exact role. Different expectations, different questions, different interviewers, and inconsistent summary evaluation processes all add up to massive noise that rewards first impressions and confirmation bias and loses sight of the best candidates in the process.

We can help you create a consistent, effective, bias-free approach to hiring that transforms time-consuming, scattershot interviews to effective, deep dive data gathering sessions. We’ll help you identify the critical role elements, write the specific interview questions you need to ask everyone, and implement a practical process for bringing that information together. It’s a systematic approach that’s testable, replicable, and one that not only improves hiring outcomes but enhances the candidate experience.

4. Talent Development and Program Evaluation

Companies dedicate a lot of time and money on employee development. From free online courses and leadership off-sites to employee well-being initiatives and internal mentoring programs, the list is long. There’s just one question: do these programs actually work? Unfortunately, few organizations have the time and resources to find out if their well-intended efforts have the intended impact. If we don’t measure tangible outcomes, we risk wasting time and money on under-performing programs and crowding out the good ones.

We have the tools, resources, and experience to help you find out which of your HR and talent development programs are working and which are not. By empirically distinguishing the effective from the ineffective can more effectively target valuable resources, learn the hows and whys of what works in your specific company, and the apply those lessons to programs missing the mark. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Together, with a thoughtful, organization-specific approach to program intent, implementation, and measurement we can help improve outcomes for all of your stakeholders, from new hires to C-Suite leaders.

5. Human Cognition at Work

What actions can we take right now to improve our individual attention, focus, and effectiveness? What can we do to increase our ability to learn, develop, and retain new skills and knowledge? How can we transform ourselves and our employees to become a real learning organization in practice, everyday? If you are asking these questions, then you are getting to heart to performance at work. You are also in luck because applied research in human cognition and behavioral science has yielded a clear, empirical set of practical principles that increase learning, improve performance, and create sustainable daily workflows.

In our targeted seminars, we bring together the foundational insights of memory, cognition, emotion, and neuroscience research to build an essential toolkit of individual practices and collective actions that reshape organizations and change lives. We’ll show you how to learn hard things more quickly, how to cut down on the number of meetings and make them more effective, explain why task-switching is absolutely killing your productivity, give you strategies for structuring your day, and teach you the foundational principles of deep work to protect your time and attention. When we recognize our limits we become free to develop our limitless strengths.

These are principles that last because they’re principles that work with your brain in mind.