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Why People Analytics practitioners can never remember your name

By | Matthew Hamilton | Head of HR Strategy & People Analytics at Protective Life

Author’s note: while most of my articles are geared towards others who are directly involved in implementing people analytics, this one is more targeted at those people who interact with analytics practitioners on a regular basis – CHROs, HRBPs, etc.

A few years ago, I was in a small conference room with a colleague, Jon, working on a workforce planning initiative. Wanting to understand how an upcoming organizational change would impact our diversity, we needed to cross-reference demographic data from our HR Management System with the workforce planning rosters. When we opened up the spreadsheet, however, I was dismayed to see the employee rosters listed out by… name.

And name only.

As I type this, I can feel the collective groan emanating from my fellow people analytics practitioners. We’ve all experienced this dreaded moment in some form or fashion. If you’re not a people analytics practitioner and are wondering “So what’s the problem?” then I implore you to PLEASE read on.

To say this got me in a tizzy would be an understatement. There was a lot of complaining and more than a few NSFW words that I uttered. You see, when dealing with data, there’s the concept of a key – that crucial piece of data that uniquely identifies each record. In our case, an employee ID that identifies each unique employee. And this roster had no key.

The problem with names, as special as they are to each of us, is that they’re not unique (and that’s true even if your name is UniqueU’Nique, or Uneek). People get married or divorced and change names. Sometimes we use preferred versus legal names. And sometimes we simply misspell names, even common ones, when typing them into spreadsheets. Even when none of those things happen, they’re still simply not unique. My company only has 3500 employees, yet we have six pairs of employees who share the same full name.

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