People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work

Preface

People analytics is simultaneously an extremely old and new phenomenon. When we use data to uncover the workplace behaviors that make people effective, happy, creative, experts, leaders, followers, connectors, early adopters, and so on, we are using people analytics. Thousands of years ago, this data came from humans’ observations of the world. By watching their collaborators interact with other people and react to changing conditions, people were able to make educated guesses about what makes them effective and happy. Later, we augmented our senses using surveys and interviews. These methods allowed us to obtain responses from thousands of people, establishing new metrics that were a bit more quantitative, but this did not herald any ...