From spreadsheets to people analytics: Gore Mutual tackles turnover with employee personas

With the insurance industry undergoing a massive turnover as 50 percent of its workforce will be retiring by 2028, legacy firms are faced with the task of either getting onboard with technological advancements or giving up.

Gore Mutual is one such company, and CPO Sonia Boyle has brought data-driven people analytics to the nearly 200-year-old insurance firm, coinciding with a doubling of the workforce.

“We weren't actually using employee data in the way we should have been. It was just very manual. I think a lot of HR teams still struggle with that, and particularly ones of our size,” says Boyle.

“In order to keep up with what we were doing, we really wanted to look at a solution, because the manual spreadsheet wasn't keeping up with the growth of the company, and certainly the expectations as we went on this journey to become a national insurer.”

Working with a people analytics platform, Gore Mutual’s use of employee journey mapping and comprehensive employee personas has resulted in an eight percent increase in employee engagement in six months and a 25 per cent increase in employee retention.

Drilling down into data for turnover predictions

Recognizing that they were heading into uncharted territory, Boyle and her team brought on a data engineer from another department who had an interest in learning about HR, and who has been instrumental in the transition and led the initiative.

“His knowledge really helped educate me and the rest of the team, in terms of what this tool could do, and really around sophisticated people analytics and capability,” she says.

“Because if you're a generalist HR person, you do need that partnership … we're really fortunate we have somebody who's running our HR operations that happens to be very well-versed in data and analytics.”

Implementing strategies such as employee journey mapping and personas has allowed the HR team to hone down on specific high turnover points and tackle them head on, leading to a marked reduction in overall turnover. Prior to using people analytics, the team relied on anecdotal evidence and historic trends, Boyle says.

Granular take on employee turnover

But it isn’t only turnover that the data is helping them address. The precise nature of the information is allowing the company to be even more granular, highlighting exactly where in the employee journey employees are leaving, how long they tend to stay, and at what age.

“We're able to really drill down into that so then we can create programs specifically, or address issues specifically for a particular employee cohort or for a team,” she says.

Mapping out personas has allowed the team to identify specific needs of employees as well, she says – for example, what’s important to a new hire, a longer-tenure employee, or someone who’s recently been promoted.

“It helps us make decisions to drive employee engagement,” Boyle says. “The impact is when you have data to make decisions around hiring, around engagement opportunities, around structural opportunities. I think that makes it a better experience for the employees, because we're not just going by anecdotal data or historic data or ‘what feels right’.”

People analytics add legitimacy to HR function

One of the main learnings Boyle and her team have drawn from this experience has been understanding the employee population and bringing that understanding to the rest of the leadership team at Gore.

Gaining executive leader buy-in was an important first step to the digital transformation, she adds, but one of the best results of the data analytics HR strategy has been the elevation of HR’s visibility within the organization as the integral function that it is.   

This is done through demonstrating with data that the core problem of a high turnover rate often is not what it seems to be.

“The data doesn't lie, so we've been able to change mindsets for people around what the actual issue is,” she says.

“We're trying to create a culture around data decision-making across our team, and when the leaders see the capability that comes out of this, it just creates so much buy-in and credibility on our team that it's really elevated our status as an HR team.”