Famous English poet, William Wordsworth said, “Child is father of the man.” The thoughtful statement signifies what an adult can learn from a kid. Because kids are an honest judge and they give raw feedback.

Now going a step further, have you ever thought, what can a baby diaper teach about analytics?

At People Matters L&D Conference 2018, Industry leaders gathered to share their learnings on how they have used L&D in their respective organizations for better business decisions.

Babu Vittal, VP & Head- HR, ShopClues, who was earlier with Flipkart, drew a connecting line between the baby diapers and the analytics and where analytics has been used in L&D. 

Vittal talked about how Flipkart was among the first of organizations to set up analytics as a practice and later it became an adoption. 

He mentioned, in the year 2013 when Flipkart was graduating from selling books to other products, during a weekly review presentation the team discovered that sale of a particular product is going up during midnight. After digging deep, the team found it was the baby diaper which was selling like hot cakes.

The Flipkart team scanned the entire scenario and found that the new parents were not getting enough time to buy products and they only get time after the kids go to sleep. The baby diapers were one of such incidents as many instances were happening in the company.

This incident worked as a learning scenario for the team to understand what change they are experiencing. The company realized the science behind it and moved on from normal metrics of excel to analytics.

The company beefed up the hiring and got business analyst, finance and product analysts on board. A senior HR person was also hired to take the responsibility of introducing analytics in HR. At that time analytics was new in the e-commerce industry.

The panelists shifted their discussion to how academics are lagging behind from the current demand in the industry and how colleges need to follow what the industry needs.

According to, Mohan Kannegal, Senior Director, EMERITUS, It’s wrong to say that academia is doing the catch-up. Academia was always there and. Recently MIT has allocated $1 Bn for setting up an AI university. Universities are spending heavily in this direction, and various colleges are tying up for giving social courses on artificial intelligence. 

L&D and attrition

L&D has been heavily used as a retention strategy. But it is still debatable if it can be used as a strategy for stop attrition.

Babu Vittal, said,  “Irrespective of the industry it’s not possible to arrest attrition, but it’s a little bit notorious in the e-commerce sector as the workforce comes and go in large numbers. We get appreciated by the CEO if we able to retain employees for one year.”

Experts suggest the HR heads need to keep a tab on all the employees and a one to one conversation definitely works to curb attrition. The HR team needs to keep a track on the employee’s time interval.

The experts also urged to change the mindset about analytics. The moment we think analytics we immediately think statistics, maths, and Excels, but ideally, we should think analytics as the signals, and those signals will be very simple such as the change in the behavior of the employee towards work, achieving goals, etc.

If any organization can unlock such problems, the attrition rate will definitely go down, suggest experts.  

The above speakers were sharing their views on ‘Application of Analytics to drive Learning & Development and how can you better your business decisions.’