The numbers are adding up in HR

Before joining AB InBev my interest in numbers and analytics was pretty low and my skills were in bad shape. On my second day in the job, I remember asking my first manager, ‘How do I do a sum in Excel?’ My manager (who has a degree in engineering) looked at me with a big smile as if I was joking. Sadly, I wasn’t and I realised I would need to close this gap!

Since then, I’ve completed my Six Sigma training (White and Greenbelt), taken Excel lessons, watched hours of YouTube videos and become a certified Six Sigma trainer. Now on a long-haul flight I don’t watch movies, read or sleep. I open my laptop and play with numbers in Excel. Creating formulas and segmentation, looking for data and insights to help me make better decisions – yes, I am a geek and proud of it.

Historically, disciplines such as sales, supply chain and finance have been leading the way with data, whilst HR has been at the bottom of the data pile. Unfortunately, HR is often seen as the admin people who write employment contracts, ensure staff get paid, and support people when something goes wrong.

Decisions have traditionally been made based on qualitative information founded on opinions, beliefs and past experience. Everyone has an opinion about Human Resources. Everyone knows which candidates they want to hire, which team are the most effective or when we have a retention issue. The challenge in HR today is moving decisions away from being opinion based and towards being fact, data and evidence based.

To change this, we need to fill the gaps in HR data. Don’t get me wrong, qualitative data, insight and experience are important – they’re the things that put the ‘human’ into Human Resources. But it’s important to add quantitative data with qualitative information. Our people are our competitive advantage and to understand them more, to enable, empower, develop and retain them, we need to change the way we work. We need to stop being administration assistants and become true HR business partners.

At CUB we’re investing a lot of resources on analytics and we still have a way to go, but we have a solid strategy based on 5 Keys of People Analytics.

5 Keys of People Analytics:

1)    System & structure: Having a centralised HRIS where data will be hosted is essential – one single source of accurate date. Avoid anything manual (not sustainable) and invest in automation.

2)    Quality: Data quality is always an issue – rubbish in means rubbish out – but don’t let this deter you. Understand and interrogate your data collection process. Establish where the issues or mistakes occur and then change the process. If your forms are always incomplete when received from your staff, go back, re-design your form or the process to make it easier for the user. DESIGN THINKING!

3)    Data points: It’s now time to think outside the box. People data is everywhere. It’s not simply about the traditional information – turnover, time to recruit, compensation data, and so on. To elevate people analytics, you will need to find new data points. We recently found a correlation between our employee engagement and the number of meetings they were having. Not surprising really – a bad day for anyone would be when you have spent all day in back-to-back meetings and ‘got nothing done’.

4)    Insights: Data is important but insight is critical. What is useful about this information? What can we learn from it and what can we do? Creating tons of fancy charts, reports or PowerPoint slides telling us about our past won’t make us successful. It’s critical to work with the business and leaders to understand the business problems we need to solve. Then use data, reports and analytics to understand the reasons why and find the solutions.

5)    Skills: As a Human Resource function we need to change our focus from processing and sterilising data to hypothesis creation, consultation, data and hypothesis evaluation and storytelling. We need to do more than create a waterfall or boxplot chart! Good thing is we are usually surrounded by great experts! Don't look for consultants, instead knock at the door of other departments for help! At ABI, we are lucky to have strong People Analytics foundation with great leadership from Jake Carpenter from our HQ office in NYC!

With greater access to data and more sophisticated analytics, my facts and figures fantasy is coming true! I’m a very happy numbers nerd, and much more informed.