Dear HR Professional,

Why is the time better today than last year for HR to help the business in making important decisions based on facts rather than guts ? Why do we need to connect the many data silos that have been storing different types of data for years and years ?

Although it is true that business strategies cannot be executed with data-driven insights alone. However, data-driven HR processes and decision-making can help ensure every individual contributes their best self to the business in the smartest, most meaningful way possible. Focusing only on HR while making decisions about people (the most important company asett, remember?) will not give the right basis for sound decisions.

Because many organisations have established new, consolidated state-of-the-art HR solutions to optimise operational and process targets they now have a stronger foundation on which to exctract knowledge from their vast amounts of data.

If your organisation does not readily have the ability to answer pretty basic, commodity type performance indicators like the ones below:

• What is our total headcount
• How is our headcount split on cost categories (country, managerial level, job types, employee/temp/contingent)
• How is our headcount trending over time in different parts of the organisation and as a whole
• What is our retention rate in different parts of the organisation and as a whole
• Who has voluntarily left us in the past 8 quarters and why did they do it
• What is the average time to hire per job type in different parts of the organisation and as a whole
• What is the average time to fill per job requisition in different parts of the organisation and as a whole

Then you are probably not able to answer more advanced questions like these ones

• Is there a correlation between business financial performance and performance evaluations across the organisation
• What has your employee satisfaction survey told you about HR service delivery, employee & manager self service, access to insights the past 2 years and what was done to sustain the strong areas and strengthen the weaker spots

And this means - in all likelihood and I am sorry to say it out loud - that your organisation is likely to "fumble in the dark" if you are implementing new systems or processes or trying to improve existing systems or processes. You may succeed, but chances are that it is more based on luck and chance than anything else.

So please, dear HR professional: care about data management. Care about HR analytics. Care about correlations. Do not break down the HR silo or try to build an all-encopassing company silo, but connect the silos. Care about helping the business get insights into the valuable data that the HR function possesses. Help bring knowledge to action. Build a more intelligent company. Establish people analytics. HR is a valuable silo that should be connected with finance and customer for the mutual benefit of HR, Finance and Customer processes.

All the best,

Erik Ebert, GP Strategies

Solution Architect with a passion for bringing together Human Resources and Finance