Why your staff don’t care about data

Are you passionate about data but don’t understand why others aren’t? Do you find it really frustrating that although data is incredibly valuable to you and your organisation, those around you don’t seem to see its value or to get the most out of the data they have access to?

If you want to be able to make a change and to get more people within your organisation to see the value in data like you do, the first step is to try and get a better understanding of why they might not care about data as much as you. What’s stopping them from embracing data and leveraging all that it has to offer?

In our work helping organisations build their data maturity, we’ve encountered several common reasons that stop staff and colleagues from taking that next step and really caring about data.

1. They think only data specialists have a role to play

It’s a common myth that data is solely the domain of specialists, and that understanding or handling data is a practice that must be left only to the experts. Wider industry has perpetuated this myth with memes like “data is the new oil” – and hence solely the domain of specialists.

Where this myth persists, staff feel that they have no ability or responsibility to consider data in their role. Working with data is in fact a common part of most roles these days, but because of this perception staff don’t consider what they do as anything to do with data.

Organisations need all of their staff to have a basic level of data literacy – and this includes understanding what part they have to play. With the right data literacy, almost everyone in the organisation can spot opportunities for using data to improve their own processes, and everyone (especially senior leaders) will understand what responsibilities they have to ensure data is collected and exploited legally and ethically. Building this understanding is a really important driver to staff doing the right things and caring about data!

2. They think data requires technical skills

Although more and more of us have access to more and more data these days, being able to really understand it, interpret it and use it can feel hard for some.

Many people believe that working with data requires strong technical skills (such as working with SQL or APIs) that can only be developed through learning or fulfilled by hiring. So, people shy away from it and thus, data becomes a low priority for them and something they’d rather avoid than embrace.

In practice, even large organisations might only need a few technical specialists. The skills that the majority of staff actually need are the basics: understanding what business insight can be driven with data, what sort of processes it can help automate, and how to collect and handle it well.

If staff have a basic level of data literacy they will be able to and implement more of this themselves with the simpler tools they have access to. They will also know when it is time to hand off to a technical specialist and can communicate with them effectively.

3. They don’t understand what data exists

The amount of effort required to find, analyse and use data can feel like more than it’s worth. If data in the organisation is confusing or ill-organised, it can present a major barrier to use.

Some people may struggle to find or gain access to the data they need. It might be impossible for them to discover data or challenging governance might prevent them from accessing it. When it’s not clear what data the organisation already has, new data collection efforts will tend to collect duplicate data or use inconsistent formats – making it harder to combine with existing data.

Others may become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data available to them and won’t know how to fit it together. If there is a large amount of data and it is not well documented or organised, the cognitive burden of understanding how to use the data correctly can outweigh the benefits.

Organisations that develop a culture of “collecting data for use and reuse” will keep their data clear, organised and understandable. Developing this culture doesn’t necessarily require fancy tooling or tedious processes – it just requires staff to be open, collaborative and able to see the big picture. When staff approach a problem they want to solve with data, they will know where to look, how to access it, and will feel part of a wider support network.

Also see our articles on: 4 Reasons why data silos are dangerous to ignore and 4 Steps to eliminating data silos

4. The data they collect doesn’t get used

Sometimes the reason people don’t care much about data is simply that they don’t see their good work being used. If your staff don’t see data being used to make key decisions, being shared openly or generating insights, they won’t have confidence that the work they’ve done or could do around data is important. Teams without belief in wider data use will do the minimum required so they can move onto more apparently important tasks.

Senior leaders have a responsibility to champion where data is being used, and this relies on them understanding data too. If their senior leaders don’t know what they can do with data, or on the flipside don’t know why their staff doing data badly matters, why would teams care about it?

Instead, staff’s work with data needs to be rewarded and shared. Let them interact with the data and see the results that it lends itself to, and make sure feedback that data driving positive change is regular and supportive. If staff see how their data is making a difference to the organisation, they can give it the attention it deserves and also focus their time on the data that is actually needed.

5. They lack confidence in data quality

It’s difficult to care about and appreciate data if it’s essentially always wrong. If your staff can’t rely on the accuracy of the data they gather or are given then why would they use it and how can they possibly trust it?

When staff see a “broken window” in data – evidence that something is incorrect – it undermines trust in the whole data process even if the error is small or localised. Once standards slip, staff lack motivation to put effort into data collection and processing, and low-quality inputs lead to low-quality outputs. This is a vicious cycle with data getting worse over time.

If there’s no single source of truth for any part of your organisation’s data, it means that different teams are left to their own devices and to define their own ‘truths’. This leads to much confusion over whose data is correct – and the true answer is usually “neither”.

Ensuring high quality data across the organisation can be a real challenge, however it’s important to try and establish a certain level of confidence and to set some standards in the quality of data being shared and used. There is no magic bullet for inaccurate data – data quality must be regularly assessed and issues addressed. Where duplicate data has emerged, act quickly to converge those data sets before they diverge further. Make data into a real asset that people will value, find useful and be motivated to keep high quality.

6. They don’t have your investment

Making the best use of data within your organisation doesn’t require massive investments in staff, training, and tools – but it does need the right investment. Highly paid technical specialists will struggle to succeed if there hasn’t been an investment in general data literacy throughout the organisation, pricy business intelligence dashboard tools will just gather dust if there isn’t good data for them to display, and development time invested in gathering data into massive (costly) data warehouses is all wasted if the data is never used.

A good Chief Data Officer (which can be a part-time role), will help you to define a data strategy and make the right investment choices. Their job will be to get your culture and processes back on track, setting data governance standards, identifying the training your existing staff need and establishing whether any technical specialists need to be hired. With that in place, your staff will be able to tell you what other tools they actually need to do their jobs – most of which will be surprisingly cheap!

Understanding these issues is the first step

Those are our six reasons for why your staff may not currently care about your organisation’s data. Although each of these are potentially tricky issues to overcome, understanding them is the correct first step. If you recognise some of these issues in your own staff and are ready to address the challenges, we can use our experience to help you – get in touch with us and let us know how we can support you in helping your organisation care about data!

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