Deloitte Greenhouse: Singapore

The client’s challenge

A leading global financial services firm, with more than 80,000 employees, had launched an ambitious effort to overhaul the way that it manages and uses human resources data. Deloitte Southeast Asia’s Singapore office (Deloitte) HR analytics leader was asked to produce a human resources “dashboard”—a continuously-updated set of visual metrics for monitoring the HR function. And he had only two weeks to show senior executives a working prototype.

Deloitte’s solution

When the client engaged Deloitte’s Greenhouse team in Singapore to meet their tight deadline, Deloitte professionals designed an intensely collaborative approach: a one-day session for nine of the client’s HR analytics specialists that would generate all the specifications for a prototype dashboard.

The Greenhouse session opened with a crash course in the psychology of data visualization, followed by exercises to reality-check the client’s ideas about what HR metrics the dashboard should display. The Greenhouse facilitators had interviewed executives about how they would use the dashboard—which resulted in creating ‘personas’—allowing the HR analytics team to walk in the shoes of the executives they were serving.

The personas helped the HR analytics team realize that the HR metrics on their ideal dashboard differed from what their executives wanted. Adjusting on the fly, the Greenhouse team made time to work up a new set of HR indicators during the workshop. Without that discovery, the dashboard would have fallen well short of the executives’ requirements.

For the final segment of the workshop, the team sketched a prototype of the dashboard, using visualization best practices to ensure that the data was displayed in fashion that required little-to-no thinking to comprehend.

Impact on client’s business

By the end of the Greenhouse workshop, the group had come up with a solid design concept for the dashboard. Just two days later, the Deloitte team had built a working prototype. Building the dashboard so quickly allowed the HR analytics team to give executives an intuitive, powerful new tool for tracking the state of the company’s workforce. That single working day in the Greenhouse made all the difference for the client’s HR program.

Said the Head of People Analytics of the session - "Thank you for today, it was a pleasure working through the session… and taking advantage of your collaborative “Greenhouse” space, it really helps to set everyone in the right “innovative” state of mind."