This handbook page is meant to cover who we are and why we exist at GitLab. On this page you will find some resources and documentation about the way we work. This document will change as often as our methods and work does and contributions are welcome!
The study of people at work! Human Resource departments (the People Group here at GitLab) everywhere are flipping their approach to organizational behavior. Instead of only using experience, opinions, or intuition to make decisions they are leveraging the power of data for decision making processes.
According to AIHR (Academy to Innovate HR):
People analytics is the practice of collecting and applying organizational, people, and talent data to improve critical business outcomes. It enables HR departments to develop data-driven insights to make decisions on talent, workforce processes and turn them into actionable insights to improve performance of an organization.
There are many benefits to practicing People Analytics within organizations. While not exhaustive, below is a list of just some of those benefits to us here at GitLab.
The People Analytics team at GitLab is part of the People Operations, Technology & Analytics team. It is responsible for working with stakeholders to develop and report various People Metrics and KPIs for the business. The mission of the People Analytics team is to provide insights and learnnings from data to help inform People decisions being made at all levels of the organization.
GitLab's commitment to transparency and efficiency is reflected in the Data team's use of technologies like dbt and Snowflake to provide reliable and timely data to company leaders. By adhering to strict data governance and best practices, the team ensures that the data is consistent and easy to work with, while also complying with all applicable laws and regulations.
We have a data governance process in place to ensure that we are only extracting data that we are authorized to access. This involves working closely with our People and Legal teams. We also have a process in place for handling data requests from team members, which involves verifying their identity and ensuring that they have a legitimate business need for the requested data as well as approvals from stakeholders. You can find more information in our Data Governance handbook page.
It is not necessary to have a large suite of tools in order to be an effective People Analytics team. Many organizations can get started by using Google Sheets or a similar tool. Here at GitLab, we use whatever is best to get information to our stakeholders. Below are the tools we use and how we use them here at GitLab.
