Whether forecasting a baseball team’s odds of making it to the playoffs or a region’s rainfall for fall, this much is true: Data is king. The same can be said about understanding employees—just ask the people analytics teams tasked with tracking and forecasting workers’ behavior.

Within these departments is a growing number of leaders focusing specifically on the future of work. Job titles related to the future of work have increased by 60% since early 2020, according to LinkedIn data provided to Forbes, with companies including LinkedIn, GitLab, and Microsoft adding such roles to their ranks. Meta’s director of future of work, Kelly Monahan, believes these roles will be key to HR’s long-term strategy.

Zoom out. Emilio Castilla, a professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, defines people analytics as “a data-driven approach to improving people-related decisions for the purpose of advancing the success of not only the organization but also of individual employees.”

Predicting human behavior is valuable, and HR teams are taking note: The people analytics sector is expected to grow 14% YoY between now and 2030, per Grand View Research. Yuan Hou, people analytics strategy manager at HubSpot, told HR Brew that people analytics has “become the engine of decision making, because knowing this data gives teams an edge to win,” adding that “repeated human behavior is really the most predictive thing of future human behavior.”

What’s the future like? Things aren’t looking like Westworld quite yet, but computers are well on their way to predicting employee behaviors and reactions to environmental changes. Keep reading here.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

Welcome to our regular HR advice column, Ask a Resourceful Human. Here to answer all of your burning questions is Erin Grau, the co-founder and COO of Charter, a media and services company that aims to transform the workplace. Erin has over 15 years of experience at the intersection of talent and operations in global organizations and startups, including the New York Times and Away. You can sign up for the free Charter newsletter about the future of work here.

No matter how open your open-door policy, here’s the reality: There’s no better way to find out what’s really on workers’ minds than through an anonymous employee engagement survey. But what if your company is too small to reasonably guarantee employees’ identities won’t be revealed?

Creating an employee feedback strategy is critical to your organization’s success and will include a mix of surveys, candid conversations, and structured one-on-ones.

Let’s start with surveys. Collecting feedback at scale will enable you to learn quickly and take action. And they’re worth doing, even if your company is small!

If your company has just a few employees, limit the demographic data you collect. Kenneth Matos, director of people science at Culture Amp, assured me via email that doing so “can still give you a lot of information about the collective opinion without revealing identities. The key here is to accept the limitation of looking at your data solely on the company level rather than at all the smaller subgroups that would be much more identifiable.”

Surveys are a commonly used tool because they can be completed by employees at any time and without the awkwardness that can come from a conversation, especially when power dynamics are at play, and the results can be easily compiled and reviewed. But if you’re still not convinced that engagement surveys are doable, consider internal focus groups. Keep reading here.—EG

What else are you seeing and trying that works? Or do you have a different question about HR? Let us know at [email protected]. Anonymity is assured.