Turning Data into Workplace wins

Felipe Archila, Director, Digital Workplace Analytics, the Coca-Cola Company

Felipe Archila has over 13 years of experience across consultancies, startups, and large enterprises. For the past 4 years, he has led Digital Workplace Analytics at The Coca-Cola Company, focusing on scalability, democratization, and trust to help leaders measure how digital habits impact business processes. He is a devoted husband and father to twin toddlers and a Beagle, enjoying exercise, audiobooks, volunteering, and family time.

In an exclusive interview with HR Tech Outlook he shared invaluable insights that Workplace analytics thrives when it focuses on human behavior, respects privacy, and turns data into actionable change stories that truly enhance employee experience and business outcomes.

• Can you briefly describe your leadership role as Director, Digital Workplace Analytics? What are your key responsibilities and areas of focus?

Historically in the context of workplace technology, usage and adoption of a tool or platform has been discussed as a number of licenses consumed for the month or simply that the software was delivered to end users’ devices. As part of the Digital Workplace, we are seen as the “customer success” team for our collaboration stack, and we’ve adapted our measurement practice to more accurately determine what end users’ capabilities are with the technologies, whether they enhance or hinder their dayto-day work, and where we see opportunities to tailor our communications and education campaigns to meet people where they are. That is the role we play on the analytics team – establishing and enhancing data products designed to provide insight into how the organization approaches our digital platforms and the impact our collective digital dexterity has on accelerating and transforming the business.

• In your experience, what are the most common misconceptions about the insights workplace analytics can (and cannot) deliver?

Collaboration is a team sport, and as anyone with experience in change management can attest, it is extremely difficult to effect behavioral change without leadership buy-in and a large number of one’s peers coming along. That is why the insights are not delivered as simply a report for reporting’s sake but as an essential part of a change management framework to influence and measure the desired change happening as a group. Another misconception is that workplace analytics is a proxy for productivity or worker burnout. As an outcome-driven organization, we are very mindful not to make any assumptions about the quality or quantity of work being produced based on digital usage, and we recognize as consultants and experienced professionals that workplace technology is often not designed around humans or specific processes. There is no single target for how many emails one should or shouldn’t send! That is entirely going to depend on what the process looks like today, what it could look like, and the steps to get there from a people, process, and technological standpoint.

• What are the most underutilized data sources in workplace analytics that leaders should be paying closer attention to?

Ironically enough, it’s the workers. They have so much insight into their everyday work, but as Digital Workplace and HR leaders, the questions we ask on a pulse or an engagement survey are either not actionable enough or are not focused on the role of technology on a business process. By designing surveys that can allow us to correlate pain points to processes with clear ownership, we can begin to analyze it alongside usage metrics and see similar patterns across the organization proactively.

“Workplace analytics isn’t just data, it’s understanding people, shaping digital habits, and driving change that connects technology, processes, and human experience for lasting business impact”

• How do you ensure that workplace analytics solutions respect employee privacy while still delivering meaningful organizational insights?

It is critical to approach workplace analytics with a privacy-by-design mindset. Given the constantly evolving patchwork of laws and regulations worldwide, engaging Legal and Privacy teams early in the design process is essential. Transparency about what data is and is not being processed as part of workplace analytics is equally important. Surfacing de-identified and aggregated insights with a minimum group size threshold is an excellent start, but privacy-by-design must extend throughout the entire data lifecycle, beginning at ingestion. Privacy professionals can guide compliance efforts, assist with navigating works councils where applicable, and ensure relevant privacy notices are updated to reflect how employee data is used and protected. Any vendor processing workplace analytics on your behalf should demonstrate compliance with global privacy standards by using cryptography, maintaining clear data lineage, and having a data processing addendum in place that ensures best practices for data storage and processing.

• What strategies do you use to translate complex analytics outputs into actionable insights that resonate with non-technical stakeholders?

Begin your conversations with the end in mind. Based on the desired outcome, collaborate with stakeholders to identify which inputs can be measured to influence that outcome. This involvement ensures stakeholders better understand the metrics selected because they had a role in defining them. When the connection is clear upfront, telling the change story becomes much easier. You may need to do some homework, such as immersing yourself in a day in the life of someone in a particular business unit or function. The process may require practice, as some leaders may still look to you for guidance, asking, “What should our target be?” Challenge that by focusing on the end and working backward. This approach often results in different targets or even different metrics, which is perfectly fine and expected since everyone’s work and processes are unique. Keeping the human focus and end goal in mind accelerates buy-in and effective storytelling.

• What advice would you offer to organizations just beginning to implement workplace analytics solutions, especially in terms of setting realistic expectations?

Workplace technology strongly impacts an employee’s overall experience, so alignment and buy-in from both your CIO or CTO and HR leadership is crucial. Ensure that the changes you plan to implement are measurable. While it may be tempting to pursue highly transformative initiatives, these often lack a straightforward set of metrics that can be easily analyzed. If your goal is behavior change around a specific platform or set of tools, ensure those tools can enable success by offering robust analytics with integration into your HRMS of choice or by allowing data integration for your team or a vendor to generate insights. A phased approach is encouraged, particularly for global organizations. You might demonstrate the value of analytics by initially including workers from select countries, guided by your privacy team. Finally, prepare a clear elevator pitch that shows analytics improves business outcomes by enhancing digital behaviors, processes, and efficiency.

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