Data Viz At Tesla: Love Hate Relationship Between HR And Data

Tesla Motors is a good example of a fast-growing company who acknowledge that the more you scale, the larger volumes of data you need to analyze and translate into forecastable results, new business opportunities, and manageable solutions. Boryana Dineva, Tesla’s Head of HRIS & Analytics, who spoke at the Data Visualization Summit in San Francisco, believes that when a company grows as fast as Tesla, they must be capable of visualizing this process in order to control the quality of it. Since 2011, the company has grown 1,700%, having internally expanded to over 11,500 employees globally. Visualizing workforce trends has therefore been imperative during this ongoing phase of hyper-growth.

Even though data viz tools allow for more structured and engaging interpretations of data, there must be a clear understanding of what an HR department wants to learn from this data. In order to be efficient, organizations who operate internationally, for example, need to acknowledge that there are cultural, legislative, and other unique features across different countries that they must comply with, and that’s one of the reasons Tesla is trying to make data a foundation of HR. To do this, the company has been testing various approaches and experimenting with ideas until they got it right. At present, Tesla is trying to make all their HR resources – benefits, training, recruiting, compensation, and employee relations – data-driven. However, they found that implementation of these practices is not always easy and varies from one HR unit to another.