Making People Analytics a Win for Your Entire Workforce: Q&A with Kathryn LaViolette of BigBear.ai

After recent acquisitions and merging of different entities, BigBear.ai – which delivers AI-powered analytics and cyber engineering solutions – realized they needed visibility into their people and structures. Kathryn LaViolette, HR Tech & Analytics Manager, recently sat down with ChartHop to discuss how expanding the use of their people operations platform helped improve data accuracy and boost employee engagement.

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We hear time and time again from companies that sharing their people operations platform with their entire workforce is a game-changer. How did you introduce ChartHop to all employees?

We initially introduced ChartHop at the top level. But we knew our data wasn’t great – we had three or four different systems we were working with that had different data points – so we started cleaning it up and pushed it to the top tier. Then we rolled it down to the next level management team and cleaned up that data as well. We then decided, as a new company, that we needed to establish a culture of transparency. That’s when we made the decision to push it out to everyone.

Once we made that decision, our first goal was to get the people operations platform socialized. We therefore chose to start with the “About Me” form, which is a pretty popular tool. Our CEO talked about it at an All Hands call and then we rolled it out through our single-sign-on to get employees to log in. We really encouraged everyone to take a look, noting that it was the first time in our organization that an employee could come and view the entire org chart and not only see where their peers are, but anniversary dates and who their manager’s managers are.

It’s important to give that transparency, and we’re doing so with some basic navigation tools.

Employees can fill out and access their About Me forms in ChartHop. As an added bonus, consider sending completed forms out via Slack to foster connections.

Some people struggle with the data-cleanse process. How did you get buy-in from each tier to go through, evaluate, and cleanse your data rather than dismissing that step?

Everybody benefits from good reporting. Due to our acquisitions, our data was kind of smushed together. Some of it was commercial, some was federal. Since different groups were merged together, we didn't have a systematic way of knowing skill sets, collecting resumes, identifying talent goals, and knowing people’s roles and certifications.

But everyone had skin in the game to get the reporting right. And because the leadership team felt invested in doing so, it wasn’t a hard sell.

Not cleansing our data wasn’t an option for us, because if you don’t get your people data right, you can’t work effectively downstream. We wanted to use ChartHop for more accurate reporting and to be able to look into trends, so that kind of transparency was really critical. We also needed to make sure our data was accurate before we pushed it out to employees.

And the whole thing actually became a really collaborative process. Engaging mid-level management was a win-win. They had some ownership of the activity, so it wasn’t just leadership giving top-down orders.

It sounds like the planning process increased collaboration across your teams and departments. Now that the platform has been rolled out company-wide, what other benefits have you seen?

We’re working on creating more engagement – we’re going to use shout outs soon. We’re also planning on launching performance management through ChartHop. We’re really trying to tackle developing relationships and getting to know one another beyond technical skills.

ChartHop will also help develop our talent by capturing employee goals and feedback. Since it captures survey and 1:1 answers, we can check back in a quarter and see if we’re still working towards a goal or if we were derailed. I love that it will keep us accountable.

Lastly, I think there’s more trust now that there’s more transparency across the organization. We were never a big company, nor were the ones we acquired, so the ability to see our org chart and empower everyone to learn about their peers brings some integrity to the team. That level of honesty is so important for a newly-formed company.

Make your org chart and employee directory visible to your people to increase transparency and foster connections.

Make the Most of Your People Operations Platform

Interested in learning more about using a people operations platform to understand your workforce and people data? Check out four ways the right technology gives you a holistic view of your people so you can start making data-based decisions for your organization.