Overcoming Inertia: Start Developing People Analytics to Gain Strategic Momentum

Analysing data to make decisions or develop strategies is nothing new. However, many People and Culture functions have missed opportunities to adopt people analytics as a central tenant of their operating models.

Data has, in the past, been treated by organisations like a precious commodity – like oil or gold – which need to be carefully mined and processed in a way that maximises its true value, given its limited abundance. Today, that perhaps couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s everywhere, and the tools available to smartly turn data into something highly valuable are right at our fingertips.

In People and Culture, there is tremendous amounts of data about the people in the organisation, the process used to attract and hire talent, and the external market. With an ever-increasing focus on employee engagement, developing strategies to retain, support and grow the careers of employees, and of course on cultivating ideas and productive practices; people analytics is now essential.

For P&C or HR Executives to be effective as an advisory function, data is central. Perhaps more than ever since the invention of HR as a discipline, have Chief HR Officers and their teams been called upon to weigh in on the future of work, the workforce strategies that underpin future organisational delivery, and provide an informed view of how to execute on that workforce plan.

Without the right information, it’s impossible to confidently answer critical questions about today’s workforce, let alone shape the strategy.

Most business leaders understand people analytics are critical to their success – through competing for talent and ideas, understanding the needs of their workforce, instilling a sense of belonging, and staying ahead of their competitors.

The only trouble is, often they feel under-resourced, constrained by poor systems, and frankly don’t know how to start building up their people analytics.

Overcoming Inertia

Psychologists often speak about overcoming inertia by letting go of perfectionism – which could be what’s holding back P&C functions leaning into developing people intelligence to advise their organisation.

The reality is there are some practical ways to get started, and clear means to demonstrate the benefit of investing in people analytics. The impact of people analytics is far deeper than the traditional views, which centre around hiring data and employee engagement surveys, to determine operational activity.

Here are 3 key pillars in which people analytics can drive decision making and help align the enabling activities and governance layers, which will take your talent strategy forward.

• ?Workforce Planning and Design

People analytics help organisations to plan not just for retention and future talent needs, but also the worker categories to best drive performance.

This can drive decisions around blended contractor and permanent workforce talent needs, and skills outsourcing, as well as development planning, succession planning and informing proactive sourcing strategies in order to de-risk your organisation from losing hard to find skills in internal and external markets.

• Experience

People Experience. Leadership Experience. Candidate Experience.

Each layer of experience leaves an imprint on the feeling, engagement, performance and success of the talent within the organisation and potential talent externally.

Leveraging information around engagement, satisfaction, inclusion and more can create clear maps for solving experience – investing in the right places and creating meaningful connections throughout each stage of the talent lifecycle, resulting in personalised experiences that unlock the potential of the workforce.

• Talent Acquisition Process optimisation

Critically evaluating each moment and phase of the talent acquisition process turns operational data into powerful strategic input.

How?

Each phase of the talent acquisition lifecycle requires key activities to enable talent engagement, targeted recruitment plans and attracting diverse candidates. These present an opportunity to evaluate current practices and assess future state processes, and enable technologies and skills required to achieve the workforce strategy.

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Where the challenge lies

Developing a useful set of people analytics of course comes with some challenges. The sheer amount of raw data available can be overwhelming, particularly when contained in disparate systems not yet configured to produce intelligence. Making it all work together to develop your own analytics suite requires key considerations including:

Technology: Implementing analytics can be an exhaustive exercise in selecting or configuring HRIS, Applicant Tracking systems and other tools used in the talent lifecycle, often which requires a complex set of data management principles, investment in platforms, and detailed configuration

Governance: How the People and Culture, Talent Acquisition and related teams utilise technology to manage their day-to-day effort underpins how useful the data will be. Aligning processes, team structures and roles, and ensuring the products the teams use to produce reporting is critical.

Capability: Extracting reports is one thing, but overlaying available data with market information, trends, economic constraints, and your organisation’s talent strategy to create talent intelligence is not so straightforward. This requires skills in research, data visualisation, along with a true understanding of people operations.

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Once the inertia is overcome, gain momentum

We recommend simplicity in the approach to developing people analytics. Converting data into trends, understanding the impact of engagement interventions, and considering the performance aspects of the workforce are tried and true – they can help identify skill gaps, gain you a better awareness of candidate fit, candidate experience, process and technology optimisation. Start with what information is available, use an agile fast-learning approach to build an insights picture around the organisation.

Know your workforce strategy. Invest the time in understanding the key skills required to perform in the organisation, and the profile of the workforce you need in each function and department. No two workforce strategies are equal, but critically evaluating your workforce mix and job designs against competitors can be crucial to understanding future talent gaps.

Identify the key organisational challenges. Invariably, there is a confluence of operational challenges taking say 90% of effort, and the remaining 10% focused on the future workforce. Your job here is to ensure the key questions your function is being called upon to answer, can be picked up in the people data. Then, we recommend breaking down these challenges into the now, the next, and the future

Start Measuring. Simply, if you’re not collecting it, you can’t measure it. Make sure your systems are set up to capture the data you need. Once you understand this, the issue of using data falls into place: it is to provide evidence of how your story unfolds.

Think about visual presentation. The presentation of insights to create ‘talent intelligence’ has become a powerful force in the quest to source, hire and retain top talent. Studies show that as much as 90% of the information transferred to our brain is via visual content. Keep insights simple and avoid the dreaded death by PowerPoint. Insights and data aren’t the same thing - insights should be designed to move the conversation?away?from the data and into action.

Continuous evolution. There will be some ‘aha moments’ which enable tactical, operational, and strategic actions. For every insight you gain, the more questions you will have on what the data is telling you, and likely, the more interest you will receive from business stakeholders. This can cause frustration but is part of the process, using this to drive your teams to ask questions to refine the people strategy, and their roles within. Setting an always-learning approach to insights allows you to be ready for evolving business objectives, and in drastic market shifts, understand the workforce levers you can use to drive engagement, attraction, retention, and performance.

Now you know, you can do.

You may find yourself in limbo between making current systems work, while waiting for the future state technology ecosystem business case to be developed, or to simply have the bandwidth to be able to dedicate effort.

Provided you have the means to capture key data across the talent lifecycle, by implementing some simple principles you can build a people analytics picture for your organisation.

Perfection in execution of systems and analytical tools is not what’s mission critical, action is. The importance of building a picture on the workforce you need now, and your performance in attracting and engaging that workforce must evolve continuously in line with your organisational strategy.?