Original subtitles

My name is Cliff and I'm

a workforce planning and people analytics lead at Google.

I use data to help our employees be more productive,

more connected, and just

overall improve their well-being.

I also use data to improve our HR practices and

focus on our hybrid work policies

as well as our location strategy.

I've always been interested

in issues of workforce development,

people strategy, human resources,

but I didn't anticipate

what a central role analytics would play in

my work and how much I would come to love analytics.

One of the things that has helped me develop

a confident voice in this space

has just been an understanding that we work in teams.

We work cross-functionally and I don't need to

bring all of the solutions to a problem.

I'll bring perspective on

how we can use data to solve this problem but I'm working

with people who also bring

a wealth of skills and looking at it really is

a partnership where it's

really about leveraging the best of everyone on the team.

That's helped me bring a lot of confidence to the work.

My go-to strategy for communications

when working with partners is to

first set up a few low-stakes meetings just to

understand what their broader business goals are.

I'm not even thinking about

the specific project we're working on,

but more broadly, how do they define success?

That helps me understand where the work that we're

doing fits into the context of their bigger picture.

The second thing I do from a communication standpoint is

to try to play back what I think I heard somebody say,

to repeat it back to them if whether

it's my understanding of their question or

the output that they're

trying to see from the data just to

test if I actually really understand their goals.

When I'm working with somebody and I

feel we're not getting to

the root of a question or a problem,

what I find as really helpful is

laying out from a data perspective

a set of different options or

possibilities for them and engage in

a conversation around which of those really

resonate for them and so it's finding

a balance between listening and

telling as a way

to unlock the data

that they might not have thought about themselves.