People Analytics and Fairness Within Organizations

At a recent virtual panel discussion organized at MIT Sloan, two industry executives and an MIT Sloan professor focused on the important and timely topic of people analytics, including how people analytics techniques can be used to ameliorate bias within organizations. 

People analytics—a data-driven approach to improving people-related decisions in organizations—has considerable promise, but it also has some potential pitfalls. That was one of the messages at an informative and wide-ranging panel discussion on people analytics organized at MIT Sloan and held on December 10th via Zoom.  More than 300 people registered for the event.

The event, which was called “Managing with Fairness: The Role of People Analytics” was cosponsored by the MIT Sloan People and Organizations Club; the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan; and the MIT Sloan Student Life Office. The featured panelists were Jennifer Kurkoski, Director of People Analytics at Google; MIT Sloan alumna Stephanie Lampkin, CEO and Founder of Blendoor, a social impact analytics company based in San Francisco; and Emilio J. Castilla, the NTU Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The panel discussion was moderated by two MIT Sloan MBA students, Riddhima Sharma and Mari Georgiadis.  Barbara Dyer, Senior Lecturer and Executive Director of the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan introduced the event.

“I feel very optimistic that people analytics is going to be helping organizations to collect the data to really start figuring out what kind of patterns” and unfair organizational outcomes might need the attention of management, said Castilla, who teaches an MIT Sloan course on people analytics strategies and is Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) and a Faculty Director of IWER’s Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative.

Lampkin discussed the use of people analytics to spot inequities within organizations so they can be addressed. "I see data as acting as a little bit of a carbon monoxide monitor for managers," she said. "So it's not necessarily that you use it to automate decision-making per se but rather put measures in place to identify where there could be inequities or imbalances happening, and you can leverage technology to do that."

"I think one of the big opportunities for people analytics is less in providing the right answers than in asking the right questions," said Kurkoski. "There is a need increasingly to use data to help us highlight what we don't know, and what's missing," she added.

However, while people analytics techniques have the potential to ameliorate issues such as implicit bias within organizations, that’s not the only way they can be used. For example, Castilla expressed concern that some people analytics initiatives are too narrowly focused on improving individual performance and reducing turnover without looking at larger contextual, organization-wide issues. He also cautioned that “if there are leaders out there who are unethical, they are going to be using people analytics unethically.”

The December 10^th event was part of a webinar series at MIT Sloan called “Redefining Management: Leadership for Social Progress in Troubling Times.” Events in the series will be held throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. The next webinar is slated to take place in March 2021; if you’d like to be notified when registration for the event opens, email goodcompaniesgoodjobs@mit.edu to be added to the mailing list for the series.