A year with a robot as my HR coach

Two major learnings

There are two major take-away’s from this.

First of all, it’s clear that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to people analytics and predictive analysis in the HR field. The more sophisticated the software gets, and the more data it gets access to – both from surveys and from IOT and telemetric data from your behavior e.g. on your computer and in your office systems – the more qualified analysis, recommendations, and predictions it can make. It can even act before you do.

We’re looking into five potential data sources:

• Basic HR data (age, education, skill set, previous roles etc.)
• Survey data (our opinions)
• Behavior data (like the telemetry data generated in Microsoft O365 or from IOT)
• Relations (data collected and visualized as Organizational Networks – ONA)
• Output data from production (like documents, perceived value, profit, results)

No doubt, this kind of solutions can and will replace some parts of my work. I absolutely see it as an augmentation to our role and function as leaders, and I welcome it. However, with the premise that we must have a debate and alignment on the ethics side of this. Many leaders who engage in shaping their future will at some point start adjusting their moral compass, and debate both humanistic and philosophical angles to work and the way we behave and treat each other. The use of data and the amount of transparency is a part of this, as is the role of software.

Secondly, we learned a lot about ourselves in the organization and as individuals in our collaborative teamwork. Partly, because Leo asked us questions, we’ve never asked before. In that sense it removes confirmation bias from the conversations we have internally. Fantastic input to me as a leader, to get new views on the issues! Partly, because we looked at Leos recommendations with a good amount of skepticism.

“So, Leo reports to us, that we need to have more often 1-on-1 conversations. Is he right?”, we would ask. The truth was, that we met 1-on-1 weekly, and had daily chats with each other. None of us could recognize the issue, that Leo brought up. BUT, it made us have a conversation about the frequency and quality of the 1-on-1’s and on who talked with whom and about what. That was some amazing dialogue, that we never would have had without the input from Leo.

Leo was a fantastic tool and helped us in developing a new level for internal dialogue on strategy, innovation, culture, organizing, and leadership. We closed this experiment by the end of 2017 and said goodbye to Leo.

Now in 2018, we’re trying two new systems, and we’re experimenting with how few data points we can measure, and still get useful debates and support for each other.

We’ve debated the thoughts and learning in our Danish podcast in Episode 3 “Hvad har robotter med ledelse at gøre?” and Episode 16 “High tech eller high touch”, and in two blog postings about augmented leadership: To bot or not to bot, part 1 and part 2.