Working in People Analytics, I am constantly sending out data, especially in the form of dashboards. Dashboards are great because they can visually show a lot of information in a concise way. I love building dashboards because it allows me to tap into my creativity and display different types of data in ways that can be consumed intuitively.
To me, these dashboards are chock-full of insights just waiting to be acted on. I get all excited, pour my heart and soul into those suckers, and gleefully send them out to stakeholders. And then, nothing happens. And it’s heartbreaking.
After a particular period of mourning, I started digging into where things were going wrong. I didn’t understand how I was putting all this great data into the hands of the people who needed it but they weren’t using it. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!
The problem was, people were overwhelmed by the dashboards and didn’t know where to start. _I see the data but so what? _I spend so much of my time entrenched in data that sometimes I forget that most people don’t. While interpreting data has become intuitive to me, people who don’t spend all day, every day up to their ears in numbers need to spend a lot more conscious effort interpreting.
I have found that a very simple formula for communicating data has been really helpful. I started using the formula myself and then started teaching it to others so they could pull their own insights from their data.
[Performance] vs. [Benchmark] => [Action]
- Choose a benchmark
- Contextualize performance
- Action plan
Once you have completed these steps, you can then communicate insights from the data. How are we performing against our benchmark and what should we do about it?
#dashboard #insights #analytics #people-analytics #data #data-science
