I made it happen

Why did you make it happen?

I’ve learnt from this experience that I thrive off continuous change. As a senior consultant, I never thought I would be building a business within the firm.

What’s the idea?

As automation capabilities become more sophisticated, it is vital for organisations to understand what people contribute beyond completing processes and tasks. If you can quantify the human aspect of any given role, then you can make better informed decisions about the future automation of the workforce. The contribution of humans remains highly valuable and I wanted to help businesses to quantify the value of their workforce.

My solution aims to help organisations better understand the actual value its workforce contributes to their bottom line. The goal of the Employee Value Index (EVI) is to turn the workforce from being treated as a cost to an asset. Given the rapid advancement of technology, we have never been better placed to quantify the value of the workforce and translate that into a monetary amount. In the digital age, employees leave a myriad of data trails that can be used to quantify value – from time spent on given applications to interactions with their networks.

Our clients have used the methodology of EVI to help validate subjective high potential identification procedures for employees and profile at-risk staff to help prevent unwanted turnover and improve retention.

How did you make it happen?

I built the proposition with support from the firm’s incubator (a vehicle to fund and develop our people's disruptive and proven ideas). I followed the Lean Startup methodology - a scientific approach to creating and managing start-ups and getting a desired product into customers' hands faster. Phase one involved creating a prototype. With the help of a data scientist, I used sample data to build out an algorithm to calculate employee value. When the results proved to be statistically significant, I was able to move on to phase two and take my minimum viable product to market to test appetite. I am now continuing to run client Proof of Concepts while at the same time building up a team to develop the technology.

What has been the highlight so far?

I developed a hypothesis for how people behave in the workforce and what drives performance. With the support of a very smart data scientist, we constructed the algorithm based on these assumptions. As you can imagine, I was incredibly nervous when I ran the reliability and validity tests. When it came out that the data did indeed match my hypothesis– that was huge! Both personally and for the proposition.

What have been the challenges?

EVI allows for the most important business asset to finally be quantified. With this, my challenge has been to not only build a compelling solution supplemented by the latest analytics and AI technology, but to also bring the market along a journey with me to prove what was once impossible is now possible. During the difficult moments, I turn to the Innovation team. They are there every day to remind me that it is my job as an innovator and entrepreneur to bring challenges to the firm, otherwise I’m not being bold enough. It would be easier to wait for the world to catch up but then someone else would have already built this venture.