Work Datafication and Digital Work Behavior Analysis as a Source of HRM Insights

The digital transformation of organizations is boosting workplace networking and collaboration while making it “observable” with unprecedented timeliness and detail. However, the informational and managerial potential of work datafication is still largely unutilized in human resource management (HRM) and its benefits, both at the individual and the organizational level, remain largely unexplored. Our research focuses on the relationship between digitally tracked work behaviors and employee attitudes and, in so doing, it explores work datafication as a source of data-driven HRM policies and practices. As a chapter of a wider research program, this paper presents some data analysis we performed on a collection of enterprise collaboration software (ECS) data, in search for promising correlations between behavioral and relational (digital) work patterns and employee attitudes. To this end, the digital actions performed by 106 employees in one year are transformed into a graph representation in order to analyze data under two different points of view: the individual (behavioral) perspective, according to the user who performed the action and the performed action, and the social (relational) perspective, making explicit the interactions between users and the objects of their actions. Different employees’ rankings are thus derived and correlated with their attitudes. Finally, we discuss the obtained results and their implications in terms of people analytics and data-driven HRM.