Hedging Strategies for HR Analytics

Organisations and professionals alike are speaking and working on Human Resources Analytics like never before and this will just grow in times to come. Few have their hands deep into it and have a strong organisational and business sponsorship while other are figuring out this space for adoption.

This takes me to my journey of HR analytics which I always practised as a professional but had a chance to formally drive HR analytics in my current organisation. It was the winter of 2015 when I decided to drive HR Analytics in my organisation and put up a case, I remember I called it project Déjà vu as the proposal was to work majorly on predictive and prescriptive analytics, not to mention the journey of the same through descriptive and strategic analytics. The rest was history on what we did with a small, highly effective and passionate team and team members I take pride in.

Fast forward to the current date, with numerous projects accomplished, many uncharted territories scaled and some really cool work done in HR Analytics domain, with these I had numerous learning and what people believe as challenges to start a Analytics practice, I want to share about how to sustain your journey and have specific strategies in place to hedge yourself against odds so that practice succeeds in it year over year.

That’s how I have derived the inspiration for this article and share an over view to Hedging Strategies for HR Analytics. I am listing down various thoughts and learning for hedging Strategies the HR Analytics leader needs to take care of:

Run it like a professional, not like a cottage industry

If you run HR Analytics projects as a hobby class it will continue to be not seen and taken seriously. Hedge yourself and your team from the temptation to do those things which people ask for and rather focus on what people ought to know. Create your mission plan, connect it with organisation mission and vision. Don’t have a temptation to pick any data churning project which you look at, be specific in what you want to pick which is aligned to your HR analytics roadmap. Organisation and teams may have an urge to come to your team with requests to churn any and every data, ensure your quality of projects are improving by the day and one is not getting trapped in running cottage industry of just working on excel sheet sorters and pivots, that’s just not what HR analytics is all about. Have legitimate authority and access to organisation data bases which becomes the backbone to your data access and ultimately the fuel for the analytics practice.

Reverse integration of data sources

Data acquisition is the key, your sources should be robust & system driven. For the sake of creating your first predictive algorithm you may get data with a lot of manual intervention but that will fall flat when you have to create a sustainable analytics model form the perspective of data input. Organisations have their HR database management systems and teams overlay it with multiple relevant data points from other sources, it’s these other sources which may take time and slows down the entire process of running your model to draw insights. If you believe that’s adding a specific data point from a secondary or tertiary sources adds value but to get the data one need to invest huge manual hours and takes months to clean and mature the data, in such cases my strong recommendation is to do away with it and look for other parameters which can still make your model strong. 

Democratise the power of insight

HR Analytics at times gets perceived as fancy charts and catchy visuals, however the reason of the existence of HR Analytics practice is to derive insights from data which others will not be able to get it by mere looking at the data. Democratise how decisions can be driven through insights to see a multiplicative effect of the efforts of analytics practice and absorption of the same by business. This is forward integration of insights feeding into business for value generation.

Don’t keep all your eggs in the same basket

 Stagger your projects across different life cycle of HR Analytics. This will help cross implement the learning from one to other projects and keeps the team engaged across various levels of analytics maturity curve. This is equally applicable to the tools and software’s you end up using. Diversify and develop teams competence in multiple tools. The classical challenge one otherwise faces is that they are limited by the ability of tool rather than the ability of their thinking and intellect. Keep experimenting and keep the team contemporary.

Forward integrate it with existing systems and processes

HR analytics needs to be a part of the mainstream process to aid business take decisions. Create avenues where the output of HR analytics should be integrated with existence business metrics and reports, this ensures that leaders look at the output which is connected strongly with business metrics and help connect them with the larger purpose. Organisations where they use balance score cards or other systems the output of HR Analytics should show a strong correlation and linkage to one and many pointers in the metrics.

Follow a time bound approach to perfect your model

Goes with the saying that control your temptation to be a perfectionist in this space unless one keep a tap on time. Team may have the urge to increase the confidence of the model by few basis points but in order to do so teams may get so involved that they may loose the sense of what the business wants, by when the business want and the value is in reaching out to business right when they need it or at times even before they feel the need of it. Perfect your approach but have a milestone approach where once you reach a specific platform, you take a pause and not continue working on the same model continuously only to let the business loose its attention.

Your biggest hedging strategy is communication

Communicate what the team does, timelines it takes, who you are, what teams members can deliver, are business speaking with you directly, generate reports which is customised, don’t just be a analytics geek but be a sales person too to take your work ahead to others who would be benefitted with it. Hedge yourself with all possible concerns and at any point the team can not be off the radar of its communication with stakeholders.

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