McKesson's Approach to Workforce Analytics and Employee Engagement (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: McKesson is a global leader in healthcare supply chain and technologies. We supply about one-third of the pharmaceuticals in the U.S., so distribution is at the core of what we do. We also have over about a quarter million SKUs in terms of medical supplies, providing those to hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices. In terms of our approach to workforce analytics, probably the first important thing to note is that we differentiate between reporting and analytics, and we treat those things separately. Where my team comes in is looking at bringing multiple data sources together, looking at historical trending information, and then applying statistical methods to move from reporting to performance metrics and analytics and analytical insights. A few years ago, we rolled out a platform that provides dashboards and key metrics like headcount, recruiting, attrition to our HR business partners in the field. So it was really a key thing for us in terms of democratizing data. We wanted to make sure we were getting the right information to the right people at the right time to make business decisions. Risk is always top of mind, I think probably more so now than in years past, and that comes with the variety, the velocity, and the volume of data coming in, which is more now than ever. Data security, data privacy, and then also operating effectiveness and business impact. One of the things we've done to mitigate that risk is establish a Workforce Planning and Analytics Center of Expertise, or COE, within McKesson, and that is bringing analysts from different parts of the company together under one operating unit. McKesson has a relentless focus on our customer and the customer experience. What we are beginning to focus on now is ensuring that our employees have just as an exceptional experience as our customers. One thing that we are seeing from the very high participation employee surveys is that employees want to have a voice in this process. I think there is an opportunity to fundamentally reframe the context in which we interact with employees to truly allow employees to be a stakeholder and to be part of the dialogue with people analytics functions, and that is a fundamentally healthy thing that could also drive higher productivity. As I think about advice to other HR organizations or groups that are starting up people analytics teams, a few key points come to mind. The first is start with the business in mind. So think about what business question you're trying to solve. Another key point is to ask yourself what is scalable. So is the piece of analysis you're working on or the product you're working on, can that be used by another business at another time? We're at a point right now when we think about GDPR, when we think about data privacy, when we think about people analytics, we're at a unique inflection point possibly of bringing those things together and creating a truly unique dialogue with our employees where we can share what we are planning on doing and allow them a voice in that as well and to help direct our work and opt in to that work. So I think it's a very promising opportunity and a very promising moment where we can create a different type of relationship with our employees and the people analytics groups. I'm looking forward to the next year and two as we go down this journey.