Over the last hundred years, the world of work has changed a lot. People are no longer offered "jobs" but experiences similar to customers and, instead of "roles", they expect meaningful careers. Work should be a reward and entertainment for them appropriately balanced with their personal lives. Despite all this, however, employers still want to turn their people in super-efficient machines. They believe that modern analytical tools and big data will help them, but this is a mistake.
That is the opinion of an internationally recognized expert in psychometric testing Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of organizational psychology at University College London and vice president of Hogan Assessment Systems, who recently gave an interview to HRTV.cz. In a recent article on the Harvard Business Review website, he explained why we expect the impossible from the big data.
More and more research confirms that most large companies are seeking to integrate data on employee competencies, skills and personalities to be used in talent management and the overall corporate management. Collecting this data using modern technology is quite easy. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, however, believes that there are at least three major problems.
1. Protection of personal data
Although most organizations are authorized to collect and process data about their employees, they do so at the expense of employee morale and engagement.
2. Lack of expertise
Data provides useful answers only if we know how to ask the right questions. Managers who want to understand big data properly will a need much broader knowledge of computer technology in the context of organizational psychology than they have now.
3. Organisational politics
Even though employees and managers may agree and understand the ways big data, is used, there will always be a difference between what companies should do and what they actually do. The ability to identify problems better does not automatically mean the ability to solve them better.
"We are still far from turning people into productive work machines. Technology does generally make things faster and cheaper, but it also introduces privacy concerns, requires additional training, and gets mired in the same organizational politics that plague every new initiative ... Employees may at best resemble spiritual machines: too fixated on meaning, failure, and success to be hyper-efficient," concludes Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.
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