Tracking COVID-19 Impacts on Your Workforce (#2 in our COVID-19 series, including a quick tool)

Our objective in this series is to offer our team’s expertise to the public during this crisis in the same way that Walmart delivers trailers of water to natural disasters. The “water” we have to share is our expertise in workforce strategy, HR processes, data orchestration, and people analytics.

This is a follow-up to our first COVID-related blog post People Analytics for measuring the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19), in which we laid out a set of critical “Level 1” questions that organizations should be able to answer during the onset of this pandemic.

Later in this blog, you will find information regarding a very quick-and-dirty tool we have developed. Before we get there, however, let’s step back for a moment to assess the broader topography of today’s situation.

We are in a massive global pandemic that has already demonstrated its exponential potential. Organizations will have a variety of people analytics to help them make data-driven decisions regarding their workforce and their overall operations. We have not experienced anything quite like this, so we should expect it will require great empathy and creativity, a willingness to lead, and the agility to test, fail, and learn.

If we consider breaking this out into phases that organizations may pass through over the next several months, we can start to anticipate the shifting needs for people analytics. These phases will not come with clear markers, so the only way to know where you are is to step back at regular intervals to reevaluate the situation and reallocate your efforts. 

We have developed a quick tool for the current phase.

The tool we assembled is focused around the first phase of the crisis -- where we are right now. It is built to answer some basic questions, acknowledging the unfortunate reality that our HR systems are unlikely to possess the information we need. As a result, a process will be needed to capture and consolidate the needed information.

In these situations, it’s critical to seek out only the most critical data elements (ie, “KISS”). A simple dataset, updated daily, has the potential to provide business and HR leaders with the “situational awareness” they need to make decisions quickly based on facts.

The “COVID-19 Workforce Tracking” tool that we developed is a free Excel-based tool that can be used by organizations of any size, including those with limited people analytics resources. It aims at answering most of the questions laid out in our previous blog.

One example is a mid-size medical device firm without a people analytics team. They are already getting started with the tool, standing up a daily update process with ~4 representatives from various parts of the business making updates into a shared worksheet. One person then ensures the dashboard is validated and then it goes to the CHRO for review with business leaders.

It’s worth restating that our objective here is to get something out to the maximum number of people in the shortest amount of time. Hence, this quick solution in Excel.

Our team obviously has an ability to stand up these metrics and a series of new ones in our One Model platform where we have robust data handling and visualization, but moving data to our clouds will require information security reviews by most organizations which takes time. (We have opted to deliver the “water” now and come back with sandwiches real soon.)

The first iteration of this tool (v1.0) can be accessed at the bottom of this blog. You will be asked for your email so we can communicate when any new versions are released.

Here’s a view of the dashboard:

And here is a view of the dataset. It is a series of HRIS data fields (not all shown here) combined with a collection of 8 data fields (in yellow) which should be updated daily:

Below are a few notes on the tool:

• Manage sensitive data according to the applicable laws and your company policies.
• This is built in Excel so it can be used quickly by the widest range of users.
• The data collection template is intentionally simple to ensure it can be sustained as a daily process, ideally by a single point of contact.
• A slim set of ~8 questions, combined with some basic employee data will enable you to answers to nearly all of the critical questions.
• The basic employee data will be taken as a baseline/snapshot. Terminations will be tagged (not deleted) and hires would be added to the list.
• The dashboard will provide a set of key metrics with ability to filter the results several ways.
• You and your teams can and should modify it to meet your needs.
• Future enhancements being considered (your input on this is welcome!)
• Macro to import the real-time statistics from the global COVID-19 tracking data as managed by Johns Hopkins University.
• Access to cloud-based solution within One Model technology to enable benchmarking across companies, reduce version control issues, and enable advanced modeling and forecasting through our One AI machine learning/AI platform.

Below is the link to the latest version. As updates are made, the latest version will always be posted within this blog.

Current Version: 1.0

To download the tool, please click the link below.

About One Model

One Model delivers our customers with a people analytics infrastructure that provides all the tools necessary to directly connect to source technologies and deliver the reporting, analysis, and ultimately prediction of the workforce and it's behaviors.  Use our leading out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, dashboards, and domain expert content, or create your own as you need to including the ability to use your own tooling like Tableau, Power BI, R, Python as you need. We provide a full platform for building, sustaining, and maturing a people analytics function delivering more structure information, measurement, and accountability from your team. Learn more at onemodel.co.