People Analytics

In this module, you'll meet Professors Massey, Bidwell, and Haas, cover the structore and scope of the course, and dive into the first topic: Performance Evaluation. Performance evaluation plays an influential role in our work lives, whether it is used to reward or punish and/or to gather feedback. Yet its fundamental challenge is that the measures we used to evaluate performance are imperfect: we can't infer how hard or smart an employee is working based solely on outcomes. In this module, you’ll learn the four key issues in measuring performance: regression to the mean, sample size, signal independence, and process vs. outcome, and see them at work in current companies, including an extended example from the NFL. By the end of this module, you’ll understand how to separate skill from luck and learn to read noisy performance measures, so that you can go into your next performance evaluation sensitive to the role of chance, knowing your environment, and aware of the four most common biases, so that you can make more informed data-driven decisions about your company's most valuable asset: its employees.

In this module, you'll learn how to use data to better analyze the key components of the staffing cycle: hiring, internal mobility and career development, and attrition. You'll explore different analytic approaches to predicting performance for hiring and for optimizing internal mobility, to understanding and reducing turnover, and to predicting attrition. You'll also learn the critical skill of understanding causality so that you can avoid using data incorrectly. By the end of this module, you'll be able to use data to improve the quality of the decisions you make in getting the right people into the right jobs and helping them stay there, to benefit not only your organization but also employee's individual careers.

In this module, you'll learn the basic principles behind using people analytics to improve collaboration between employees inside an organization so they can work together more successfully. You'll explore how data is used to describe, map, and evaluate collaboration networks, as well as how to intervene in collaboration networks to improve collaboration using examples from real-world companies. By the end of this module, you'll know how to deploy the tools and techniques of organizational network analysis to understand and improve collaboration patterns inside your organization to make your organization, and the people working within in it, more productive, effective, and successful.