Solving business problems with people analytics: Novartis
Case study on evolving a new approach to performance management
Case study on evolving a new approach to performance management
People analytics is the practice of gathering and using data about your workforce to enable evidence-based decision making for the benefit of your organisation and its people. By taking a systematic and critical approach to examining people data, people professionals can contribute to an organisation’s success by creating insights on what can and should be done to drive strategic change.
The CIPD has conducted case study research with a number of organisations to understand how they are using people analytics to deal with a variety of business challenges. Their experiences and insight can help you in your own context to embrace people analytics and adopt good, data-supported actions to improve organisational practice and performance.
Organisation: Novartis
Industry: Healthcare and pharmaceuticals
Size: Approximately 110,000 staff
Speaker: Niamh McNamara, Programme Lead of Evolve (Novartis’ performance management experience)
Our staff had voted to ‘kill performance ratings’ in a crowd-sourced event attended by over 30,000 associates in 2018. We clearly needed a better approach to managing performance, and one that’s backed by evidence.
We started an experiment in 2019 to test our hypotheses on performance management and performance-based reward. Over 16,000 of our associates, across eight countries and seven business units, representing all the different personas in the organisation, participated in the experiment. We partnered with CEBMa (Center for Evidence-Based Management) to look at external secondary research to validate our decision.
Our associates preferred the new performance management experience and less than 5% wanted to revert to the old one. Agreement scores to a list of statements were significantly higher post-survey than pre-survey:
The experiment’s results and CEBMa’s evidence revealed that having both individual and team incentives were more favourable than just having team-based incentives.
We took an agile approach to building our new performance management experience, with data continuing to be integral to the decision-making process. We’ve introduced an exceptional high impact award to celebrate individual performance annually, and are recognising teams more frequently with a new capability, built into to our recognition platform.
We now have a performance management experience that is better aligned with our staff’s preferences. Having the opportunity to work with our data scientists gave real confidence that what we proposed to the Board of Directors for approval was based on solid evidence. On an individual level, I’d encourage everyone to build their people analytics capability as it can really support your career growth.
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