Vol. 1 No. 1 (2025): Foundations of People Analytics
Our inaugural issue sets out the foundations of people analytics: what the field measures, how organisations onboard and pay their people, and what the evidence says about transparency.
The two articles in this issue combine survey evidence from small and medium enterprises with cross-jurisdiction data on pay transparency, and together frame the questions the journal will return to in later volumes.
Articles
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Onboarding Practices in Small and Medium Enterprises
Small and medium enterprises employ most of the world's workers, yet research on onboarding focuses largely on large corporations with dedicated human resource teams. This study explores how smaller firms welcome new employees and what difference their practices make. We interviewed owners and managers in 41 firms and surveyed 530 recent hires about their first ninety days. Most firms relied on informal methods, including shadowing, conversations with the owner and learning by doing. Where these were supported by a simple checklist, a named buddy and a clear conversation about expectatio… -
Compensation Transparency and Pay Compression
Pay transparency policies are spreading, but their effects on how salaries are distributed within organisations remain unclear. This article studies compensation transparency and pay compression, the narrowing of pay differences between employees with different experience or performance. Using payroll data from 36 employers over six years, we compare organisations that began publishing salary ranges with similar organisations that did not. After disclosure, pay gaps between men and women narrowed modestly, but differences between longer-serving and newer employees narrowed far more, and high …
