Lessons from the World of Sports
We've observed previously that the world of sports has been in the vanguard in making use of workforce analytics (with the playing field representing the workplace). Baseball, with its discrete inputs and outputs (balls, strikes, singles, doubles, runs, outs), has always been the ideal sport for stat-heads. Newer, often exotic-sounding baseball measures like WAR and UZR have even begun to creep into mainstream media coverage when evaluating what teams are most likely to end up on top at the end of the season, who's productive and who's not, or who's earning their salary and who's not.
On the other hand, until recently, more free-flowing team-oriented games like soccer, hockey, and basketball have proven fairly resistant to the successful application of analytics. How to measure how much a soccer team's passing contributed to the end result in a 1-0 game? Or how to make sense of the often barely-controlled chaos of a hockey game? Or to measure the extent to which a basketball team's defensive positioning and teamwork affects the likelihood that a given shot goes in?
Seeking to improve their understanding of what's really driving the bottom line - wins and losses - team executives and fans alike have combined creative thinking, improved computing methods, and sheer doggedness to create new insights into what matters most in each of those sports as well.
And so it is in the work world outside of sports. Companies have long deployed statistical measures in key areas that were easier to measure (e.g., ROI, EVA). The more free-flowing areas of work - like how employees get the job done, how they learn from one another and, most importantly, what matters to the bottom line - have been much more resistant to measurement and analytics. But no longer. Tools and techniques (like the McBassi People Index�) now make it possible to measure precisely what specific elements of an organization's work environment are most important in driving outcomes such as sales or safety or employee retention.
Organizations not pursuing such analytics are increasingly at risk of being left behind, with a lousy won-lost record, mired at the bottom of the latest standings.