Hersh Patel

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Organizational network analysis: overcoming common pitfalls
Hersh Patel
Last modified on April 15, 2020 at 10:46 am
Experts argue how organizational network analysis has fallen short of its promise, but an organization's approach makes a big difference.

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On April 15, 2020, Hersh Patel commented on Amazon’s Warehouse Wristbands :

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

While I appreciate the potential for productivity improvement, I think this is where laws around worker’s rights need to adapt to innovation. The U.S. labor law framework for safety standards need to respond to this movement towards automation and the physical and mental toll that it can take on workers. The idea of a wristband that sends “pulses” to workers when they are in an incorrect bin could turn into something much worse, and regulation should step in before a line is crossed. I want automation to continue to happen, but it needs to be done in partnership with government to make sure workers are treated fairly.

On April 15, 2020, Hersh Patel commented on People Analytics: A Service vs. Platform-Driven Model :

Super interesting, thanks for sharing!

Instead of debating a service-led or platform-led model, should people analytics be considered a separate function in an organization at all? Ideally, it’s just another part of the infrastructure of a company – similar to how customer or financial data and analytics are used.

You’ll need engineers to build the core infrastructure platform, just as you would for the customer and financial data. You can have data scientists work with the engineers to build tooling and find significant predictors and benchmarks, but it may be better to use third party companies who are using larger datasets and/or academic research. I understand that this wouldn’t solve every bespoke people analytics request, but I imagine 80% of issues for managers and employees could be solved in this way – hiring practices, employee engagement, network analysis, sentiment, etc. The HR team could still use this data platform and create bespoke analysis to help make broad structural changes in people management, but teams across the board could use this tooling to make better decisions on a day-to-day basis.

I think this would solve for the resourcing and multiple stake holder issues you brought up. It would also push people decision making down to managers and employees, which helps get buy-in in a decentralized way.

Let me know if you have any thoughts!

On April 15, 2020, Hersh Patel commented on Wisdom of the Crowd: Interviewing Your Network with Searchlight.ai :

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

I like the idea of building this repository of references and using this as a platform that many companies start using. It’s similar to what LinkedIn tried to do with Endorsements, which I don’t know if anyone actually uses. However, I do see how this could create some issues:
1) People may try to game the system. Putting up good references for someone and doing the same in return in this efficient platform exchange could result in undifferentiated results.
2) It may be difficult to get away from luke-warm to negative reviews once they’ve been solidified, and it could be hard to get a second change. In a more simplistic way, it’s similar to Uber passengers or drivers not getting selected on the app because of their rating and never having the chance to improve upon it.

Because of these potential pitfalls around a platform, it may be better off as a one-off tool to improve the reference checking process.