Course Preview | HR Management and Analytics: Unlock the Value of Human Capital from Wharton Executive Education

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Welcome to HR Management and Analytics: Unlock the Value of Human Capital. I'm Martine Haas. I'm an associate professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to my individual contributions to this course, I'm going to be serving as your guide through the material, introducing each week's materials and connecting themes. Before we get started, I'd like to talk for a moment about the goals for this course. Our aim is not to make you an expert in HR management and analytics, but instead to introduce you to different frameworks for examining human performance and the modern workplace so that you can improve how you evaluate performance and make workforce decisions in your own role.


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By the end of this course, we hope you'll have developed a deeper understanding of areas in which analytics are being used to improve how people are managed, how human psychology drives motivation and responses to incentives, how jobs and systems of work have evolved and undergone redesign over time, of how to distinguish causality from correlation in predicting performance and making staffing decisions, of how to measure how employees collaborate within and across their business units, of how to contextualize your measures of performance and generate a greater awareness of the role of professional development, of how to think about gathering information and to make good and timely decisions, and of how to understand your organization's architecture and what it means for your employees' success.

To achieve these learning goals, the course has been organized into seven weekly modules. In the first module, Professor Kate Massey introduces learners to people analytics as it's applied in practice, demonstrating the challenges of sorting noisy data and distinguishing skill versus luck in performance evaluation. In the second module, Professor Peter Capelli discusses motivation and reward systems, particularly as they pertain to hiring and the performance appraisal process.

You'll learn how poorly designed incentives can lead to unintended consequences and how performance appraisals are currently undergoing a redesign in many leading organizations. In module three, Peter Capelli provides an overview of the history of job design and a few case examples of how jobs can be designed to bring a competitive advantage. In module four, Professor Matthew Bidwell introduces some of the statistical problems at hand in predicting performance and attrition with a focus on implications for staffing decisions. Some questions at hand are how can we assign causality to certain outcomes? How helpful are algorithms to questions of staffing? In module five, I'll introduce learners to an emerging field within people analytics, which is the study of collaboration networks, or how we can learn about how work gets done in our organizations by examining the ways people communicate with each other.

We'll discuss how to effectively evaluate, measure, and intervene in collaboration networks. In module six, Kate Massey provides an overview of the future directions of talent analytics and provides some prescriptions for those seeking to expand the use of data to make workforce decisions. And in module seven, Professor Mike [inaudible 00:03:23] will offer some templates for HR managers on how to gather information to make good and timely decisions, and how to think about the design of an organization's architecture for future success. I'm glad you're joining us on the seven-week journey and hope you'll take full advantage of the weekly lecture videos, assignments, peer discussions, and webinars. We're excited to bring more people into the discussion of HR management and analytics and look forward to seeing what you'll bring to its growth.
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