Building A Robust Data-Based Culture for Empowering HR Decisions
Most HR professionals struggle to actually utilize data analytics in their day to day functioning. One-third, in fact, can’t use data for anything more than measurements such as turnover calculations. While many organizations try to invest more in analytics related to HR, seldom do they reap full benefits due to various drawbacks.
Owing to the complexity of HR analytics and the importance of the same, let’s see how organizations can extract value from metrics and reporting.
The Foundation of Data-Based Culture
We all know the first foundation of a data-based culture is data quality, which can be achieved with proper data governance, strong analytical capabilities, and the ability to adopt data throughout the organization.
There is no rocket science in the above foundational requirements of HR metrics. However, these simple things help businesses add value to their working.
To achieve the same, here’s what you can do:
1. Create a data cycle.
2. Identify the audience critical to your business.
3. Understand the issues you need to resolve.
4. Find out proper metrics.
This process ensures proper governance, which means the right form of data is collected at every checkpoint.
Detailed Data Plan
Audience
Usually, a report would be generated and circulated through the organization so that everyone involved knows the progress of the project and how it can perform in the future. Similarly, HR analytics report talks about people and their performance. HR can prepare a report and circulate it within the organization so that the managers and team leads can understand progress and engagement level.
For instance, if a team is failing due to lack of collaboration, the HR and the manager can together come up with a solution to rectify the issue. These issues may seem small when discussed verbally but has a huge impact on the productivity of the project. Hence, HR needs to look into such matters as early as possible.
Purpose
You need to know what is the purpose of analytics.
Why are you carrying out analysis?
Who is involved?
How it will impact your organization?
How you will receive value from this task?
Typically, the purpose revolves around these three factors:
1. Measuring the progress of employees and the organization.
2. Knowing whether a specific process implementation is going well or not.
3. Tracking the trend in workforce outside your workplace.
Metrics
You need to select the correct and accurate metrics for actionable insights. The more accurate your insights, the more benefits you will be able to observe. Hence, focus on what is really important to your organization or specific teams in your organization. Sometimes, you may have to decide a different set of metrics for various teams and it is fine as it will help you reach a fruitful outcome.
Note: Remember to keep your metrics less than 20. More metrics will only clog your reports and then, there are chances that the managers won’t be able to interpret it. This would make all your efforts worthless.
Conclusion
The journey of HR analytics is often the most important yet the hardest. First, there is resistance from both internal and external sources. Second, you need to implement it in a manner to actually help the employees and the organization.
Hence, you need to traverse backward here – start by deciding what you actually want to achieve. Know the way of implementing HR analytics. Once you are clear on this, you can move forward with other tasks.
Rekha Jain
+91 70204 90700