Managing Historical Performance Data in a Dynamic Employee Environment

Given the nation’s hot job market, employee churn is an issue all organizations face today. These dynamic employee environments, in which churn comes from attrition or inter-organizational changes like promotions or lateral movement across teams, make it challenging to manage and understand performance over time. When an employee leaves a company or changes departments, their historical performance data typically goes with them. But it needs to stay with the team or department historicals too. Performance data — even from an employee who has moved teams or regions or left the company — yields valuable insights to help with future goal setting and plans. 

You want to keep the team’s and organization’s historical totals the same while also letting the data follow the individual. This takes complex rules and algorithms to manage the data correctly. 

Many companies struggle with making data exceptions or trying to build dashboards with business intelligence (BI) tools. But there are two big problems with this approach. 

• First, building such a tool requires that companies tap valuable resources — namely, their data scientists and engineers to keep up with these org changes— taking their focus away from more business-critical, strategic tasks.
• Second, because historical performance data disappears when the employee moves teams or changes employment status, keeping it involves building an actual database that maintains an accurate history of modifications to org charts and teams and performance — a “slowly changing dimension” in BI lingo and a complex problem to tackle. 

And that’s where Pathlight enters the picture. 

Pathlight automatically updates org. chart and team member changes across the organization while automatically maintaining an accurate history of it all. So, team member access may be re-assigned to other teams or deactivated, but all of their historical contributions stay aligned to the team where and when those contributions happened. Team members can also be reinstated with their historical data restored. While these tasks are all automated, Pathlight provides the option for admins to make manual changes as needed. And, because Pathlight does all this out of the box, there’s no need to rely on your already stretched data science and engineering teams.

For example, if someone on the sales team physically moves locations, they may move assigned teams based on geography. And not every move is going to neatly coincide with an end-of-month or end-of-quarter point in time. A change mid-cycle can be a difficult situation for most data teams with a number of adjustments needing to be done in the backend, leading to potentially delayed results or even missing team data. However, with Pathlight, all adjustments are done automatically, the right records are kept under the right teams, and visualizations and insights are surfaced to the respective reps, managers, and their leaders.

While the same mechanism could be applied for teams who’ve seen a team member leave the company, the benefits continue long after! Have you heard of “boomerang” employees? The pandemic caused many people to leave their jobs for various reasons and many are returning to their prior companies. Imagine if instead of starting from scratch, all of your data, feedback, and AI-driven performance insights could continue right where you left off? With Pathlight you can enable this out of the box!

The world of work is moving at the speed of light, with customer-facing employees switching teams and positions and companies in the blink of an eye. In this dynamic environment, it is extremely challenging for data teams and managers to accurately attribute employee and group level metrics.  Keeping pace with these changes without losing employees’ historical performance data requires a platform purpose-built for the job — not a DIY dashboard that saps valuable resources to build and maintain. With Pathlight, you can meet the needs of today's dynamic CX and Sales teams, providing performance intelligence that drives better goal setting and outcomes. 

To see this in action and to see Pathlight for yourself, request a demo here!