Forecasting Employee Behaviour

Forecasting Employee Behaviour (by Jaen Beelders and Elmen Lamprecht)

This article forms part of a series around HR Tech and Analytics. This article discusses the possibility for HR Departments to forecast Employee behaviour.

Every organism’s survival depends on its ability to successfully overcome environmental challenges. Particularly, humanity has based its success on the ability to analyse the environment and adjust behaviour for the best possible predicted outcomes. For example, our ability to analyse and predict weather patterns allowed us to transition from hunting and gathering to complex agricultural settlements that lead to the first civilisations. As time progressed, our ability to analyse and predict our environment has reached extraordinary levels. 

Consider the irony that our ability to understand ourselves has not advanced at the same pace. Just think about it: Around the same time as the 2nd Industrial Revolution – where we were harnessing electricity to power large scale factories – humans still had no scientific way of measuring and understanding human behaviour. Objectively analysing and predicting human behaviour has somehow lagged other scientific breakthroughs.basic business process of forecasting such as those implemented by finance departments, sales and operations have been stubbornly elusive to HR Departments. 

This inability to measure, forecast and predict human capital is the reason why HR has been unsuccessful in determining the value of their interventions. As HR professional, we relied heavily on surveys, case studies, line manager feedback and other subjective data to try and make sense of our environment. Gathering and analysing large pools of datasets were simply impossible, or at least too expensive and cumbersome. No wonder HR was, at best tolerated and at worst ignored when it came to strategic boardroom discussions. The Finance Department can objectively analyse their environment and accurately predict the financial situation of the company over a period. The Sales Department can use objective sales data to analyse the success of their strategies and can forecast projected sales figures. The same can be said for basically every department with the exclusion of HR.

The fantastic news is that, due to the breakthroughs in predictive and machine learning models we are getting significantly better at predicting human behaviour. For example, Best Buy (American Retailer) objectively proved to their board that an increase of 0.1 in the Employee Engagement score lead to a $100 000 increase in revenue per store. Famously, IBM announced that they can predict with 95% accuracy, which employees are about to quit their jobs. 

At last! Thanks to Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, HR Departments can now also use forecasting models to build People Strategies based on data and not only qualitative information.

Just imagine the impact your HR Department can have if you could accurately forecast individual employee performance 3 months in advance. What about being able to predict who will be taking sick leave and when? And what if you could boost the effectiveness of L&D interventions by linking the right training programmes with the right employees at exactly the right time.

If you want to know more about forecasting employee behaviour through advanced HR Analytics, please reach out to COGO People Analytics. Also, watch out for more articles, videos and infographics about HR Tech from COGO People Analytics.

COGO People Analytics is Africa’s No 1 HR Analytics advisory. We offer HR Tech and HR Analytics consultancy services, while our development of HR Analytic Tools (such as advanced HR Reporting which includes Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) remain our flagship products.