The Tragedy of HR Dashboards

As modern HR professionals, we know that our decisions should be informed by data. We see what is available for our colleagues in marketing, engineering, and sales, and conclude that a dashboard is what we need; a way for us to...

1. Query specific information when we want to explore a trend we've heard of
2. Be informed of emerging trends we have not yet heard of

Many a company has drawn this conclusion, and opted to build an HR dashboard internally. They go through the hard work of building integrations with HR systems, a data lake, visualizations, all to create this valuable resource. When they finally share the dashboard with HR stakeholders, most are over the moon: almost overnight, they have gone from using formulae in excel sheets, to having all these data at their fingertips. They give raving reviews and use it heavily for the first few weeks or months...

...and then usership drops. Slowly but surely, the resource you spent so much effort and money building will be used less and less often.

Why?

Because it is legitimately providing less and less value. HR data often do not change very quickly, so it's quite likely that key metrics of interest like attrition will stay in the same range, month after month. This creates a situation wherein HR professionals either (a) spend their valuable time looking for differences that aren't there 90% of the time, or (b) stop looking regularly, and miss out on the valuable insights that occur 10% of the time. Similarly, where the opportunity to filter across many different fields is an advantage at the start, it becomes too laborious to continue checking every combination of x, y, and z over time. Usership will rise when you add new tabs, users and filters, but over time the same downwards trend will reemerge.

With this in mind, HR dashboards satisfy stakeholders' needs to be able to explore trends they already suspect in their organization, but they do not satisfy the need of being informed of new trends they do not yet suspect. This is because we have constraints on our time, and spending time clicking through filters and across dates every week often isn't worth it.

Having gone through this entire process while building my own people analytics function, I came to believe this was a tragedy. In chatting with many peers, I learned I was far from alone. One of the largest aspects of a tragedy in Shakespearean terms is unnecessary waste, which is what often occurs with HR dashboards: there are beautiful, rich insights to be found, but often the temporal cost to find them is too high. Some would argue it is the role of the analyst to search for and elevate those insights to the surface, but in this age of automation, do we really need highly skilled workers clicking through filters?

My answer is no. The time of HR professionals is far too valuable to be spending so much of it sifting for gold. We have machines that help us find gold these days, why don't we have machines to help us find emerging insights? This is what I wondered for quite some time, and I couldn't think of a good answer. I concluded that dashboards (as they are right now) are not the right tool for helping HR professionals be informed of emerging trends.

I searched for a solution that serves this need, and I couldn't find it. In the end I decided to build it, and thus peopledatabot was born. Whether you're just getting started in your people analytics journey or have been on it a while, if you think your time is better spent trying to further understand and act on trends as opposed to searching for them, feel free to reach out!