Steve
Standrowicz
Operations Researcher - Office of HR Analytics
National Security Agency
Chris
Dobyns
Strategic Consultant, HR - Office of HR Strategy & Program Design
National Security Agency

Human Capital Readiness Index: Quantifying the Human Resource Challenge, and the Response

You’re likely not alone if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of the statement, “Human resources has really messed up the performance of my organization,” or some variation of that notion.

What actions should HR take to respond to such general feedback like this? HR could intervene in just one area affecting human capital management, but they’d have to know which area to start with. HR could  intervene in everything that’s people-related, or they could go another way and questions whether the problem is even HR-related to begin with.

The National Security Agency (NSA)’s typical response in the past has been a combination of all of the above. However, more recently NSA adopted a different approach involving data discovery, which enabled HR to more effectively combine a number of relevant human capital metrics and convert those to a human capital “readiness index.”

Quantifying these factors allowed for a relative evaluation of comparable business units. By inference, NSA was then able to ascertain whether a truly HR-related problem was evident. From there, contributing factors could be isolated, making more targeted exploration of the underlying factors possible.

Join Chris Dobyns and Steve Standrowicz for a true story about the NSA’s success in combining disparate human capital metrics to create a data discovery opportunity, which helped drive targeted, cost-effective and data-driven interventions.

You will learn:

  • The process, circumstance and conditions that are most appropriate when integrating human capital metrics into a single value for comparative purposes
  • How to incrementally deconstruct complex and unique human capital issues using critical thinking and available human capital metrics to empirically isolate those factors that potentially contribute to sub-optimal human capital management outcomes
  • How to arithmetically combine disparate sources of human capital data to generate representative indices values, which allow for legitimate and rationale comparison between business units