WEEK 12 TRANSCRIPT INTERVIEW WITH
SALLY SMITH NEW UPDATED
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Timothy Bednall
We're here today with Sally Smith. Sally is the Head of People Analytics at National Australia Bank or
NAB, as it tends to be known, by its employees. Sally, very grateful for you being here today because
you know, obviously you know, both got very, you know, busy schedules, so you know, I really
appreciate you’re taking the time.
Tell me, I guess I'll start by asking a little bit about. I mean your role, you know, within our National
Australia Bank, what does what does a typical day in the life of ahead of People Analytics look like?
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Sally Smith
Yeah, before I get to that Tim, will just want to say thank you for including me. I'm particularly
passionate about growing the field and really keen that we have students that had come to
understand what people analytics is in practice for one of the major organizations in Australia.
So, by way of background, I've worked in people analytics for round, about six or seven years now,
and in that time, I've been involved in various aspects of the work so.
Usual sort of pieces around reporting, providing common KPI's answering questions about Tata and
that kind of thing in the middle of those six or seven years I held rolled out. I would describe as the
highlight of my career. So, what that meant in practice was our people insights. Projects were under
untangling complex.
People related questions using data as well as science, so not just the usual suspects of opening and
trawling spreadsheets and applying algorithms, but we would work backwards from what are some
of the people related business issues that are experienced in other parts of the organization?
And also looking at some of the expensive HR practices and finding ways of doing more with less.
More recently, I've added to that portfolio and included aspects about reporting portfolio so that
tends to be standardizing some of the metrics and reporting them through executive reports or HR
related dashboards.
Uh, and at the moment we're looking at how do we take sort of what's been a very tactical solution
in reporting and scaling that out too?
Many leaders and analytics specialists at the National Australia Bank terms of an average day in
people analytics. I would say no. Two days are the same, which is what I love about my role.
