00:00:49.860 -- 00:01:04.220 Timothy Bednall

00:00:49.860 -- 00:01:04.220 Timothy Bednall We're here today with Sally Smith. Sally is the Head of People Analytics at National Australia Bank or NAB, as it tends to be known, by its employees. Sally, very grateful for you being here today because you know, obviously you know, both got very, you know, busy schedules, so you know, I really appreciate your taking the time. Tell me, I guess I'll start by asking a little bit about. I mean your role, you know, within our National Australia Bank, what does what does a typical day in the life of ahead of People Analytics look like? 00:01:38.580 -- 00:01:56.470 Sally Smith Yeah, before I get to that Tim, will just want to say thank you for including me. I'm particularly passionate about growing the field and really keen that we have students that had came to understand what people analytics is in practice for one of the major organizations in Australia. So by way of background, I've worked in people analytics for round, about six or seven years now, and in that time I've been involved in various aspects of the work so. Usual sort of pieces around reporting, providing common KPI's answering questions about Tata and that kind of thing in the middle of that six or seven years I held rolled out. I would describe as the highlight of my career. So what that meant in practice was our people insights. Projects were under untangling complex. People related questions using data as well as science, so not just the usual suspects of opening and trawling spreadsheets and applying algorithms, but we would work backwards from what are some of the people related business issues that are experienced in other parts of the organization? And also looking at some of the expensive HR practices and finding ways of doing more with less. More recently, I've added to that portfolio and included aspects about reporting portfolio so that tends to be standardizing some of the metrics and reporting them through executive reports or HR related dashboards. Uh, and at the moment we're looking at how do we take sort of what's been a very tactical solution in reporting and scaling that out too? Many leaders and analytics specialists at the National Australia Bank terms of an average day in people analytics. I would say no. Two days are the same, which is what I love about my role. 00:03:57.970 -- 00:03:58.960 Timothy Bednall Fantastic. 00:04:01.190 -- 00:04:04.680 Sally Smith Uh, so one day it could be conversations around a particular issue. So if I give you an example of one of our call centers has some kind new starter attrition and the HR team, there were keen to get underneath what might be causing that. So scoping out a potential sort of way of untangling that and finding root cause. Second question could be around no. We we're keen to focus on maintaining and ensuring our colleagues are taking regular leave. So how do we set KP eyes and sort of track those through financial year? Another day might be a being involved in some of the HR transformation work, so we don't send stand still and the work that we do with our underlying ITN reporting infrastructure. So it will be our cross HR project to look at at how do we upgrade some of our core HR information systems across the organization. Timothy Bednall Fantastic, well my students at the moment are actually working on a kind of dashboard project, where they're essentially, and you know, working with well, actually made up data set and working out. I mean one is that they can actually take that data and look at the best way of presenting it so. So that's, uh, that's awesome. I mean really interesting projects and you know many ways I. I guess you must feel a little bit like a detective. You know, in terms of, you know, looking at that data and being able to, you know, try to work out what the root causes of things like, you know, turnover and you know the accumulation of annual leave. You know Mark must be. Sally Smith Yeah, absolutely a detective and I think one of the most exciting moments is when you find an interesting insight in a data set and no for those hours or days. You're the only person that knows it. So and I always get to light up when we find something counter intuitive and I share it with a one of our stakeholders. And usually they lean in and say I'm really and then that leads to another question and good analytics. One question, one could question always leads to another. So it is a bit like a detective. As you say, a team. Or the other analogy, I would give you is it's like following the vein of caramel. 00:06:43.950 -- 00:07:00.170 Timothy Bednall I do like that analogy. I do have a bit of a sweet tooth so you know I do like that analogy as well. So what what's been, you know? One of the more interesting insights you know that you've discovered, you know, as a part of this process. 00:07:07.210 -- 00:07:22.240 Sally Smith There there are. There are quite a few, and for those of you that are keen to understand, some of the examples that now there are two IT news articles that features some of our projects so you could have a look at those as well. To answer your question, one of the one of the most interesting pieces that we found was it it actually related to the example of the attrition in the call center. So when we started out, the number was very high. The executive is in that area were particularly concerned about the level and because it was impacting impacting customer service, and it was also impacting some of the other metrics. Business performance metrics in that area. So they were keen to under to get underneath that from a perspective of, well, how do we improve the experience that our customers are have when they're calling in as well as creating a better environment for the teams to work in? Interestingly enough. When we got into that and explored it with HR as well, they equally felt the pain point because we were madly recruiting and training people only to see them run out the door. So there was pain on on both sides of the equation. In terms of that business experience into, uhm, the amount of effort and energy that I took from HR perspective and the first thing that we wanted to do was to ensure that it was a real issue. So I hear lots of things from. Our business colleagues, uh, about issues, but sometimes they're quiet isolated to specific pockets, or it's, set, the metric might be added for weather app. Might be out of sync with what they used to. But when we compare, say that with a benchmark of what might be a reasonable level, there's not sufficient upside to warrant a deep analytics project on it. Just to go back to this particular example, when we had a look at our call center situation and we compared their level of new starter attrition, when I say attrition, that's people leaving NAB. 00:09:23.700 -- 00:09:24.360 Timothy Bednall Umm? 00:09:34.400 -- 00:09:40.570 Sally Smith To get another job externally when we compared it to a a benchmark level. 00:09:41.400 -- 00:09:49.450 Sally Smith And estimated the cost, uh, we knew there was sufficient upside to warrant further investigation. 00:09:50.350 -- 00:10:14.400 Sally Smith So the first thing that we did was to share that number that I knew from that moment we had executives in our Pachar team as well as our business area. Hooked because costs NPS, they're all on executive scorecards. And Tim, I don't know about you, but I don't know any executives. It's not keen to find ways to improve their metrics. 00:10:14.450 -- 00:10:15.600 Timothy Bednall Guys yeah yeah. 00:10:15.460 -- 00:10:38.350 Sally Smith Absolutely. So I had a lot of interest at that point and we knew that it was worthwhile going through the pain of obtaining all of the data points. So this is the usual suspects of trying to source business data as well as HR data. They're difficult to join because there's four different hierarchies at NAB to try and synchronize things. 00:10:39.100 -- 00:10:42.290 Sally Smith And it takes time, energy and effort to to do it