HR analytics are a must for business futures. The datafication permitting and enabling in-depth understanding of your workforce is not a measure of volume. Datafication is “the notion that organizations today are dependent upon their data to operate properly – and perhaps even to function at all.” It enables insight, the only real value in data accumulation. It facilitates agile planning across organizational silos and multiple locations. And, human resources information systems (HRIS) are stepping up their innovative advances to move data from mere metrics to predictive analytics.
People are the Convergence of Data.
HR systems are cost-efficient indispensable tools for reporting and drawing correlations important to all organizational interests. But, your system needs to do more than count and sort. It must examine people as the convergence of data in order to substantiate strategy and plan futures scenarios.
Increasingly, employee turnover, talent shortages, ageing workers, and increased competition pressure employers. The desire for additional information pushes them towards Big Data where larger volumes, faster speeds, and more diversified sources provide the decision-making information once impossible to manage.
- Metrics: quantifiable measurements “to track and assess the performance of a business or a specific business process.”
- Analytics: the process of obtaining an optimal and realistic decision based on existing data. The analyst’s task, then, “is to understand a business context, understand the constraints and the desired outcomes, use whichever data makes sense, and offer optimal AND realistic solutions to the business.”
Analytics Shifts Perceptions.
HR analytics shifts a decision-making perception from data fields arrayed across worksheets and workbooks. For example, it does not count employee turnover; it thoroughly dissects the people who created the numbers. For another, it does not simply count and monitor employee performance evaluations for timely completion. Instead, it visualizes the quality of the human assessment transaction. And, for yet another instance, employee turnover and performance assessment provide the keys to measure the original hiring process for quality rather than speed. It is Big Data that helps this happen.
To embrace human resources information systems, HR management must first purge its data. Manually entered and mined data is, of its human nature, Bad Data. Just because you can warehouse the data in-house or in-cloud options does not make the data sounder. Likewise, securing HR analytics software will prove no service if your HR department has no one to manage and read the data. So, more and more Human Resources management teams now include high placed data analysts.
For Answer to Big Questions, you need Big Vendors.
The job, then, is to assess your needs realistically. If you want to answer the big questions, you have to think big vendor.
- Why do new hires fail?
- How well is bonus compensation working?
- What does a new recruit cost?
- How does performance assessment predict succession planning?
Research headed by Josh Bersin for Deloitte finds “only 4% of companies have achieved the capability to perform ‘predictive analytics’ about their workforce.” The rest continue to deal with data management and reporting. The businesses in this 4% also return 30% more than the S&P 500, deliver quality-recruiting remedies, and groom healthier leadership pipelines. Moreover and interestingly, the HR leadership in such data-driven decision environments are perceived more positively as making significant contributions to the business’s success.
In another analysis, Mike Collins wrote that the HR analytics need also to provide the kind of Big Data to management that facilitates high levels of utilization and faster synthesis. The outcomes must be:
- Relevant to the business issue from the top-down rather than use unnecessary resources from mining data from the bottom-up.
- Valid data, crucial to critical analysis and requiring the education and training of personnel in talent metrics.
- Compelling enough to provide a narrative and/or visualization readily readable by the C-suite audience.
- Transformative enough to be actionable – ready and accessible to change minds and forge better decisions.
Shop HRIS Vendors Smartly!
When researching and interviewing HRIS providers, frame your needs and demands in these terms. Require features and evidence of performance that produce outcomes that are relevant, valid, compelling, and transformative. You can handle the data, and you can make it Big Data. But, you need an HRIS partner able and willing to sustain a mutually beneficial relationship.