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Featured
5 min read
Christine Virjee
Data visualization isn’t just about presenting numbers—it's about telling a story. Whether you're a seasoned people analytics professional or new to the field, mastering the art of data storytelling is crucial in driving insights and actions at your organization. Annotations are a powerful way to make your charts and graphs not only more informative but also more engaging and accessible. What Are Annotations? Annotations are textual elements added to data visualizations to provide additional context or highlight specific insights. Think of them as the notes in the margins of a book, drawing attention to key points or clarifying complex information. Annotations can take many forms, including labels, callouts, or even small visual elements like arrows or shapes that guide the viewer’s attention to critical areas of the chart. Why Annotations Matter in Data Storytelling Annotations play a pivotal role in transforming raw data into a compelling narrative. They serve several essential functions in data storytelling: Highlighting Key Insights: Annotations can spotlight the most critical data points or trends, ensuring that your audience doesn’t miss the story you’re trying to tell. Providing Context: They help clarify the meaning behind the data, explaining anomalies, trends, or outliers that might otherwise be overlooked. Improving Readability: Annotations make data visualizations easier to understand and interpret by breaking down complex information into digestible pieces for a broader audience. Guiding the Narrative: By strategically placing annotations, you can control the flow of information and guide your audience through the data in a logical and impactful sequence. How to Effectively Use Annotations in Your Data Visualizations Start with a Clear Objective: Before adding annotations, clarify the main message or insight you want your data to convey. Annotations should support and enhance this message, not overwhelm or distract from it. Be Selective: Not every data point needs an annotation. Focus on key areas that are critical to your narrative. Over-annotating can clutter your visualization and dilute the impact of your message. Consider adding annotations on drill-down levels. Keep It Simple: Annotations should be concise and to the point. Use clear and direct language that adds value to the data without overwhelming the viewer. Use Visual Cues: Enhance annotations with visual elements like arrows, shapes, or colors that draw attention to the most important parts of your data. This helps guide the viewer’s eye and emphasizes the significance of the annotated data. Tip: On Windows, use the shortcut start + . (or CTRL + CMD + Space on Mac) to insert emoji symbols. Consider Placement Carefully: The placement of annotations can significantly impact their effectiveness. Ensure they are positioned where they naturally draw the eye but do not obscure critical data. Examples of Effective Annotations Before: A chart without an annotation could potentially mislead the reader. After: Include an annotation to clarify the scope of the data in question. Before: Annotation covering the data point causes ambiguity. After: Annotation placed to the side of the chart to improve readability. Annotations on Drill-Down: Annotations can be placed at different levels of multi-level hierarchies. Below is an example with an annotation on Level 1 of the Termination Reason. After you drill down to Level 2 – in this case Voluntary Termination – you can find further annotations specific to that level. In this example, you can quickly see that "Personal" is the main reason for Voluntary Terminations. Final Thoughts Annotations are more than just a minor detail in your data visualizations—they’re a powerful storytelling tool. By carefully considering their use, you can turn raw data into compelling narratives that not only inform but also inspire action. Whether you're explaining a complex trend or highlighting a key insight, annotations help ensure your message is heard loud and clear. For more information about One Model's annotations capabilities, visit our Help Center.
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Featured
6 min read
Christine Virjee
Charts play a crucial role in conveying insights, which is why elements like chart legends are essential tools for interpreting colour variations and understanding complex data sets. Let’s dive into the nuances of chart legends with five tips designed to make your charts more impactful and easier to understand. What are chart legends? Chart legends label and help explain colour variations in your charts. When used effectively, they improve readability and prevent misunderstanding. Chart legends work best when there is more than one metric or dimension, and where colour variations need an explanation in a chart. Let’s work through a few real-world examples and tips to see how chart legends can enhance or detract from a data visualisation. Tips and real-world examples Tip #1: Use legends to explain colour variations In this first example, variation occurs when there is more than one metric and the chart legend explains their meaning. In the chart below, dark blue indicates Start of Period (SOP) Headcount, while light blue represents End of Period (EOP) Headcount. It is easy to see at a glance which number and bar corresponds to each metric. In another example, variation can be depicted when there are one or more Dimensions with more than one group selected. As shown below, the colour variation indicates Male and Female Gender – dark blue for Male and light blue for Female. Again, meaning is quickly and easily discerned with the chart legend. Tip #2: Set legend position to None to hide legend in single-colour charts What happens to chart legends when there is no colour variation? Single-colour charts such as the example below with a single metric like (EOP) Headcount over time don’t usually need a chart legend because all of the bars will be the same colour. In these situations, a chart legend is unnecessary as it only serves to repeat information. Tip #3: Hide metric names when only a single metric is included For cases where only a single metric is included, we recommend the Option to Hide Metric name as this information will likely be already mentioned elsewhere, likely in the chart title or the Storyboard page. In Tile Settings, slide the toggle for Hide Metric Name to On. For pie charts, the Hide Metric option will apply when Legend is set to None and Series named selected as Data Label. Tip #4: Choose a filter to limit chart clutter Chart legends also include the selections for the Dimensions. A selection controls what is visible on the chart, whereas a filter controls what the dataset includes. When only a single selection is made, they work similarly. However, selections show in the chart legend, while filters display on top of the chart and can be hidden if desired. Therefore, it’s best practice to choose a filter to limit chart clutter in cases where selection is used to select a single point of the data. Tip #5: Use Group legends for multiple metrics In the case that multiple metrics are included on a chart or the metric name is not mentioned anywhere else, Group legends should be turned on to avoid any ambiguity. Make your charts legendary Mastering the use of chart legends is essential for creating clear and effective data visualizations. By following these tips, you can ensure your charts are not only visually appealing but also easy to understand. Whether you're dealing with multiple metrics, color variations, or trying to minimize clutter, thoughtful use of chart legends can significantly enhance the impact of your data. Visit One Model's Help Center to learn more about custom chart legends.
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Featured
6 min read
Josh Lemoine
One AI has been a component of One Model since nearly the beginning of the company’s existence. It is an integral part of the One Model platform and, as such, the team that develops One AI features aligns with the core principles of One Model. That said, there are also some more nuanced priorities that the team has remained focused on over the years. These additional core principles relate specifically to the fields of machine learning and data science. When we set out to develop a new version of our forecasting capabilities, the team kept sight of the principles that have guided the creation of the product over the years. The new forecasting capabilities combine ease of use with powerful configurability and are available right where you want them: in Storyboards. If you’re a One Model customer or considering being one, you may be interested in knowing what drives the shape of the product. Let’s take an inside look at important concepts to developing One AI functionality achieved by tying the forecasting features to the following guiding principles. Transparency In the beginning, One AI consisted of a single data scientist tackling projects in notebooks. Showing the work involved in an analysis was just part of the process. The usefulness of doing so was apparent, and ethics and transparency became core values integral to the development of One AI over the years. One of the recent enhancements to forecasting provides greater transparency into which forecasting method was leveraged and how it was configured. We added an information icon to clearly indicate that additional information is available. Performance scores are provided if situational intelligence was used to choose a forecasting method. Ease of Use As One AI has matured, we've placed a lot of emphasis on ease of use. Simply put, you don’t need to have a background in statistics or data science to get value from One AI. Embedded Insights (of which forecasting is an example) and One AI Recipes are examples of tools that improve the accessibility of One AI. Running a forecast has always been easy. The appearance of the lightbulb icon makes it clear when a forecast is available. Now, the "easy button" is more powerful. One AI can automatically select between a curve fit model and an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model based on the data contained in the trend, using AIC model scores that balance model complexity and fit. In simpler terms, One AI is increasingly leveraging situational intelligence to determine the best configuration without the user having to manually configure settings. Powerful and Configurable The skills of the future are becoming the skills of the present. Python, R, and other data science-related skills are on the rise in a significant way. More and more One Model users possess these skills. The team developing One AI has always strived to create tools configurable enough to benefit data scientists. Having machine learning and statistical capability available in the same platform as the people data the analysis is being performed on is a driver of efficiency and data security. One Model users now have the option to manipulate both general and model-specific settings related to forecasting. General settings include the ability to select the number of periods to predict, confidence interval, and bounds. If you don’t want One AI to select a forecasting model automatically, you can manually choose from Curve Fit, ARIMA, and Prophet. Taking things a step further, you can allow One AI to automatically select the best settings for that model based on the trend data, or you can configure custom settings pertaining specifically to each forecasting model. Facilitates Learning Making complex things accessible to more people creates opportunities for learning to occur. The team at One Model has been on a One AI documentation bender and has been busy creating resources to help our users. We’re also increasingly integrating additional information and context into the places where the user can benefit most from it. This is delivered through inline text, tooltips, and information popups. The main risk in forecasting is in interpreting the results. When we designed the forecasting enhancements, we introduced an information icon to tiles where forecasting is available. Tooltips were also employed to define each of the available settings. Cutting-Edge Technology In the world of data science and AI, things move fast. Generative AI is the most immediate and vivid example of this. It's an industry where you must innovate or be left behind. At One Model, we recognize this. We don’t jump on every new tech bandwagon, but we keep a finger on the pulse of innovation in the space. When it comes to forecasting, One Model offers several techniques. Two methods, curve fit and ARIMA, are tried and tested and have been around for a relatively long time. They’re sometimes referred to as “classical techniques”. The third, Prophet from Meta, is a more “modern” forecasting library. In the recent forecasting enhancements, we made our Prophet option more powerful by exposing many configuration options. Closing Thoughts Hopefully, this article has provided some visibility into the thinking behind the product decisions the team at One Model makes when developing One AI tools. We’re fortunate to be layering these tools on top of One Model’s industry-leading data integration, modeling, and visualization capabilities. We strive to deliver the best AI on the best people analytics platform.
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Featured
3 min read
Pria Shah
Struggling to find the truly important information in large tables of data? Say hello to One AI Table Insights – where you can turn your data chaos into clear insights! What Is Table Insights? Leveraging descriptive statistics, Table Insights automatically identifies potential, noteworthy, or unusual patterns within your company's HR data. It analyzes your data, offering the clarity required for decision-making. Discover answers to key questions like: Is there high employee turnover in a specific area of my organization? Are some teams promoting fewer employees? Is there a gender imbalance in any departments? Whether you're tracking employee performance, monitoring engagement levels, or evaluating recruitment and retention trends, Table Insights is your go-to solution. If it can be measured as a rate, Table Insights can P-valuate. Measuring Your Data’s P-Value One AI’s Table Insights measures the p-value of your data. But what exactly is a p-value, and why is it important? Think of the p-value as a spotlight that highlights which results are noteworthy and which ones might just be random noise. In statistical terms, a p-value measures the probability that the observed results happened by chance. A low p-value (typically less than 0.05) indicates that there’s compelling evidence that your results are unusual. This is a strong indicator that the patterns you’re seeing are real and worth paying attention to. One AI’s Table Insights simplifies data analysis and provides you with clear, actionable insights grounded in statistics. With recommendations based on low p-values, you have an additional tool to inform decisions to drive your business forward. How Does One AI Table Insights Enhance Your Workflow? Instant Insights: Forget manual analysis. Table Insights delivers instant observations, pulling out the most important data points with ease. Productivity Boost: Free yourself from tedious data crunching and focus on making strategic decisions that drive success. Tailored Interactions: Customize outputs based on your specific needs. This includes filtering data, focusing on particular metrics, and adjusting visual representations to best fit your requirements. See it in Action Check out our video tutorial and see Table Insights in action.
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Featured
6 min read
Christy Green
Multiple studies have shown that visuals improve comprehension and long-term retention compared to text alone. By leveraging tile styling in One Model Storyboards, you’re not just presenting data—you’re telling a compelling visual story that resonates with your audience and drives action and alignment. Create more than just a dashboard with One Model's stylized Storyboards. Easily communicate data-driven insights by using colors, styles, and designs that embody your company's brand. Whether you prefer uniformity across all Storyboards, unique designs for each one, or occasional tweaks to individual tiles, the creative possibilities are limitless. Case in point? Check out the Storyboards above and directly below. Real-World Impact Imagine that you’re a Director of Human Resources and need to prepare for a quarterly executive meeting with key organizational stakeholders. Your goal is to present the latest data on high-risk employees by organizational unit and demonstrate the impact of your recent initiatives on reducing risk and improving retention. Tile styling in One Model can elevate your presentation – both during and after the meeting – by visually highlighting specific KPIs that you want to stand out. Before the Meeting You can use tile styling to customize your Storyboard’s colors, making key metrics such as risk levels, retention rates, and employee engagement scores stand out. This ensures that the most important data points are immediately visible to your audience as you’re presenting. Your Storyboards can reflect your brand’s identity or your personal taste – you have the freedom to choose. During the Meeting As you present, your stakeholders are immediately drawn to the clear, visually appealing layout of the Storyboards that you’ve included in your presentation. The customized tiles help highlight trends and key insights, making your points easier to understand and more impactful. The attractive design keeps the audience engaged, and the clear visualization of data facilitates interactive discussions. Executives can quickly grasp the information, ask informed questions, and make decisions based on your insights. Sounds like the perfect meeting, right? After the Meeting After the meeting, you add your stylized Storyboard to a slide deck and share it with everyone, including those who couldn’t attend. By using distinct colors and layouts for the tiles, you make key data points stand out, so recipients can easily grasp the information at a glance. This visual clarity helps team members quickly focus on the most critical metrics and insights without needing further explanations. As a result, stakeholders can efficiently review and understand the data on their own. That means that your stakeholders have the information they need and send fewer follow-up emails and messages to you. Win-win. Tile Styling: More than Just a Pretty Feature As illustrated through the story above, tile styling in One Model is more than just a cosmetic feature; it’s a powerful tool that can transform how you and your team interact with data, resulting in the following benefits: 1. Personalized User Experience You can customize colors and layouts so your Storyboard reflects your brand’s identity or your personal preferences. This level of flexibility provides you with endless options. 2. Improved Data Visualization Custom tile styling allows you to highlight key metrics and trends effectively. By choosing specific colors and layouts, you can draw attention to the most important data points. This improved visualization helps in quick identification of trends, outliers, and key performance indicators, resulting in better and faster decision-making. 3. Enhanced Collaboration A well-designed Storyboard significantly enhances collaboration. When data is presented clearly and attractively, it becomes easier for team members to grasp and discuss insights. Additionally, customizable Storyboards can be tailored to meet the needs of different team members so you can showcase the information that’s most important to them. For more detailed instructions on tile styling, visit the One Model Tile Style Guide. Have questions? Get in touch.
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Featured
8 min read
Tony Ashton
Talent flow, whether it occurs through promotions, internal transfers, exits, or new hires, is a key facet of workforce management. Understanding these employee journeys within a company and across careers gives senior leaders insight into how these movements affect the organisation's health and growth. A survey conducted by Deloitte identifies that focusing on internal mobility improves leadership development, business expansion, and employee engagement. It also offers HR professionals deep insights into: Recruitment and Onboarding Career Progression Retention and Turnover Succession Planning Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategic Workforce Planning Wowledge states that “the positive effects of a well-structured internal mobility program ripple through various facets of organisational excellence….promoting a culture of collaboration, diverse thinking, and cross-functional experiences.” Improving ROI with Employee Retention In a world experiencing major shifts in how work gets done and the very nature of jobs utilising AI in the workplace, being able to reskill and redeploy people is more cost effective than ever. The cost of replacing your workforce is many factors higher than the cost to reskill and harness the creative capability of people you already have within your company. Gallup puts that cost at $1 trillion annually for US businesses. This financial impact means that the relationship between internal movement and length of tenure becomes critical, as SHRM reports: 24% average turnover rate in first year 5 years with no movement = 62% turnover rate Promotion within first 3 years = 70% more likely to stay Lateral move within first 3 years = 62% more likely to stay The Challenges of Talent Flow Analysis Despite its value, analysing internal workforce mobility is a major headache for HR teams. The One Model platform helps customers get a handle on this topic by solving these key challenges: 1. Stitching together movements across time and transforming employee events into a timeline. 2. Handling data quality issues with advanced business logic. Inconsistencies in HRIS movement codes can arise due to varying applications across business units, job roles, or changes from acquisitions. One Model addresses this with the ability to generate automatic mobility events as needed, such as a specific promotion and pay increase. 3. Pro-rating employee headcount and FTE daily. Unlike traditional and less sophisticated reporting that captures only end-of-month employee snapshots, One Model reports at the daily level to effectively measure time spent in each position/business unit, and identify movements in real time. 4. Aligning movements across all other analytical dimensions available in the platform, including diversity, jobs, salary grades, locations, org units, age, tenure, and more. The Foundation of Effective Talent Flow Analytics Getting your data in shape is the very foundation of good talent flow analytics. This gives you the ability to create impactful metrics like the following small sample: Promotions Transfers Hire Rate - External and Internal Hire Rate (Net) Career Path Ratio Lateral Mobility Rate Promotion Velocity Retention Rate Termination Rate Introducing One Model Sankey Diagrams Sankey Diagrams are a cutting-edge feature that revolutionise the way HR teams visualise and understand corporate people movement, or movement of discernable groups of people (cohorts) within their organisations. These diagrams are renowned for their ability to depict various pathways through a sequence of steps. For example, financial analysts use Sankey diagrams to understand investments and money movements, while Google Analytics uses them to visualise the journey of web traffic. A Sankey chart is ideal when you need to see and simplify a many-to-many connection between two or more entities. It allows HR and senior leaders to see the flow of cohorts through different departments, positions, ranks, levels of performance, and more – at a glance. 3 Benefits of Sankey Charts Workforce mobility reporting in data tables provides insights into the dynamics of your workforce. But Sankey Diagrams excel at enabling the average person to quickly see and understand lots of data and the degree of movement at a glance. A few of the benefits HR leaders gain by using Sankey Diagrams to map out the paths that clusters of employees take as they move within the company include the ability to: 1. Identify Bridges and Bottlenecks A Sankey people flowchart identifies both positive and problematic trends so you can leverage what’s working well and correct what isn’t. For example, are there certain departments acting as springboards into leadership roles? Or perhaps some areas are experiencing higher turnover, signalling potential issues with job satisfaction or career development opportunities. With this tool, these questions no longer remain a mystery. 2. Reinforce Strategic Planning Talent flow analysis with Sankey diagrams aids in strategic planning and decision-making. It allows HR teams to pinpoint where to invest in training and development, how to better support career progression, and ways to enhance retention strategies. Organisations are better equipped to tailor their HR initiatives to not only address current gaps but also anticipate future needs. 3. Support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts Sankey diagrams enable people analytics professionals to highlight talent diversity - or lack thereof - throughout the organisation. This visibility enables HR to develop targeted programs that support the advancement and retention of underrepresented groups, fostering a more inclusive workplace culture. Tell Dynamic Data Stories with One Model Sankey Diagrams We’re always looking for ways to help clients unlock a deeper understanding of workforce dynamics to help optimise their talent management strategies. The unique and compelling data stories you’ll be able to tell can be created directly within One Model Storyboards. Creating a chart involves just 3 simple steps, illustrated by a quick on-page guide. The Sankey diagram is the latest chart we’ve added to help you tell stories with your data using what we call archetypal visualisations. Data visualisations are purposefully designed to tell particular stories. Compared to generic visualisations (e.g., bar charts, line charts, tables etc.) – which are useful – archetypal visualisations are simply more compelling and fit for purpose in particular cases. The Org Chart is another example of archetypal visualisation (and more!) that are coming soon to the One Model platform. Ultimately, we believe Sankey diagrams will help you better understand the flow of talent within your company and create a more engaged, satisfied, and dynamic workforce. We'd love to show Sankey Diagrams in-person.
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Featured
6 min read
Karlene Latimer
One Model is an amazing platform for orchestrating data from multiple systems, building an intelligent people analytics-ready data model, and surfacing insights to make better people decisions. Storyboards are the key vehicle for driving data-driven decision making. Working with customers, we noticed that in order to structure and guide the narrative of Storyboards, they would often add a lot of content onto one page. And even with section headings, some Storyboards could become exceedingly long. With a very long scrolling page, the user could sometimes lose track of where they were, and the inclusion of numerous charts and tables with large queries all on a single page could lead to extended loading times. In response, we introduced Multi-Page Storyboards, a game-changer in narrative storytelling. These offer several key advantages, including the ability to delineate chapters of your narrative across distinct pages, each bearing custom-tailored titles. When One Model released the first version of our Storyboards back in 2020, we were making a conscious pivot from the traditional dashboard concept into a world where communicating ideas, insights, and driving decision-making requires more than just assembling lots of data. Yes, getting to grips with data orchestration is a great achievement, as is the creation of compelling data visualizations. However, arguably the biggest challenge is turning this sea of information into a compelling story that people can understand and use to guide action. One Model Storyboards have long provided the ability to freely arrange content to tell a great story with data with cool features like including commentary on the page, flexibility to apply unlimited filters, role-based sharing, and many more. Users can now effortlessly navigate between sections, swiftly accessing the information they seek. Each page loads content incrementally, sparing end-users from grappling with an overwhelming data dump with long wait times. Plus, Storyboard filters apply consistently across all pages, ensuring users maintain a coherent focus and context throughout their journey. So, what does this product innovation look like in practice? Let’s explore this Talent Acquisition scenario where the primary audience of this Storyboard is decision-makers involved in strategic recruitment for their organizations. Below is an example of a Talent Acquisition Storyboard. At the bottom of this Storyboard page, you will find a row of dashboard tabs with the titles of each subsequent page. Page one of the tabbed dashboard is a ‘Recruiting Leader View’ with details about the Talent Acquisition Storyboard — including its intended purpose, the information it conveys, and practical guidance on how to effectively use it. This page serves as an invaluable resource for capturing key snapshot metrics, enabling you to swiftly communicate the status of key performance indicators (KPIs). Having familiarized yourself with the overarching concept, you can delve deeper into specific, interconnected subjects on the subsequent pages. Page two delves into the realm of ‘Open Jobs’. Here you can identify key patterns and trends, view the status of jobs, and answer questions like how many roles are currently open in your organization. Use the page to track your open jobs by varying factors (such as location, department, and function) or through charts and tables tailored to your organization’s unique needs. Next, turn your attention to page three: a dedicated space to track your ‘Applicant Pipeline’. Here you can effortlessly monitor the number of open jobs, the number of applicants, where applicants are in the application process, how many offers were made, and how many candidates were rejected. Quickly measure and chart your data in easy-to-read single value tiles that effectively communicate the state of your applicant pipeline. . Moving on to page four, you can harness its capabilities to illuminate the progress of your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. This page serves as a powerful tool for gauging whether candidates from diverse backgrounds undergo a recruiting experience that mirrors that of others. Additionally, it allows you to meticulously scrutinize any biases that may emerge concerning candidates' genders, ethnicities, and ages. This is just one straightforward example of how our multi-page dashboards can serve as an effective organizational framework for consolidating insights on a particular subject. The versatility of this tool extends to features such as page duplication within and across Storyboards, dynamic page reordering, and seamless page-to-page navigation — all designed to enhance your ability to tell incredible data stories. Thank you to all our amazing One Model customers who are continually working with us to develop important new capabilities that cater to their specific needs and further empower data-driven decision making. The best part is that One Model was built to connect all of your different data sources, from HR systems like Greenhouse, Workday, and SuccessFactors, into a single people analytics platform. This means that you won’t have to go searching through folders and directories to get the information you need when you need it most. Simply use One Model’s Multi-Page Storyboards to transform your data into attractive and meaningful data visualizations for more effective decision making. Would you like to see Multi-Page Storyboards for yourself? Let's connect!
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