Understanding the adoption challenge in People Analytics and how to achieve breakthrough
People analytics has the potential to revolutionize HR by enabling data-driven decision-making in hiring, employee engagement, retention, and workforce planning. Add on the rapid acceleration of AI and growth in potential of technology and it's easy to see why more and more organisations are investing in building a stronger people analytics capability. However, many organizations still struggle with an age old problem that has haunted people analytics and analytics more generally - they can't get people to adopt it on mass limiting the value and return on investment.
In this article I explore some of the key challenges preventing people analytics adoption and provide a view of some innovative approaches to help drive breakthrough and boost adoption.
Key Challenges in People Analytics Adoption
I believe there are 5 key factors that are the major contributors to preventing effective adoption of people data and analytics products. These factors are so prevalent in organisations that the harsh reality is that most organisations have faced an uphill battle in driving adoption of people analytics.
1. Legacy of existing ways of working
HR as per the name has a history of following a 'human' based approach. Therefore understandably many HR professionals and leaders have historically operated on intuition and experience throughout their careers rather than data. What's more many have been successful doing so. This can mean there is an uncertainty of what analytics could mean with a concern that it could replace human judgment or challenge long-standing practices that people rely on and are used to. With this backdrop and context it is easy to see why some HR professionals may be resistant to change and fail to adopt the use of people analytics.
2. Lack of Data Literacy
Even if HR professionals want to use data and analytics many may lack the experience, knowledge and skills to do so. Without proper training, they may struggle to interpret insights, leading to frustration and underutilisation of analytics tools.
3. Poor Data Quality
One of the biggest detractors of people using data and analytics is a lack of trust in the data. Without trust that the data is accurate people quickly develop a belief that they cannot use the data or analytics to generate insights and make decisions.
4. Lack of Leadership Sponsorship?
Without strong executive sponsorship and leaders who role model the use of data it can be hard to drive the level of change needed to foster a data culture where adoption is high. What's more without leadership support People analytics teams may struggle to secure the resources and investment required to build a compelling and effective people analytics capability that can elicit high adoption.
5. Data Access and Product design
In some scenarios there is the desire and skillset to use data analytics but adoption is limited because processes to access data are too slow or unclear leading to frustration amongst users. Additionally, whist modern dashboard technologies have enabled easy to design data visuals there are scenarios where poor product design prevents the easy extraction of insights from the data. Without proper dashboard design HR professionals can feel overwhelmed by too much data or poorly designed graphs that make it hard to see key trends.
How to Break Through These Barriers
This challenge is not a new one and as it continues to plague the people analytics industry I believe it requires us to rethink our approach to solving it.
The typical approach to driving adoption for many companies has been to:
I am not proposing that these are wrong and indeed it is worth having initiatives to drive all of these. However, I believe it is clear we need to do more and try out new approaches to help achieve the adoption outcomes we want.
Here are four approaches companies should add to their strategy to try to help reach adoption target's:
Start with the why and align with the wider HR Strategy
Within Simon Sinek's leadership concept of starting with the Why he states 'There are only two ways to influence human behaviour: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it'. In order to truly inspire people to use people analytics there needs to be a strong 'Why'. To help here people analytics teams need to ensure clear and tangible connections of their strategy, products and services into the broader HR strategy. Moreover, this needs to be consistently and repeatedly communicated. When this is clear within the minds of HR professional data culture campaigns, data literacy training and leadership sponsorship become significantly more effective.
Integrate data and analytics into the HR operating model:
By embedding data and analytics more deeply into the processes, roles and measurement frameworks within the HR operating model companies can drive up usage and adoption.
First organisations need to define what the key HR operational and strategic decisions are that are made regularly and identify what meetings/processes these are made in. Next they need to ensure that data and dashboards are embedded into these meetings so that data driven decision making can become the standardised way of making decisions and a core part of the HR operating model.
Furthermore, organisations should review key HR role descriptions and embed the relevant expectations around use of data within these to ensure their operating model has roles within it that have clear accountability for using data within their work.
Finally, companies should ensure that the use of data becomes engrained within their performance management process. Individuals and line managers in HR should be setting goals and objectives that not only measure the outcomes they achieve but also asses the use of data to complete key tasks and drive business outcomes?
Elevate analytics product design?and move to Co-creation
With the emergence of enhanced Gen AI capabilities there is the opportunity to compliment analytics dashboards with a different type of product design. By providing users with chat solutions alongside dashboards there is the possibility to give users the option to engage and explore data through natural language. This removes data fear and makes analytics as easy as chatting with a colleague and in doing so could boost adoption.
Another key shift is to introduce the practice of co-design for analytics products. . Instead of pushing dashboard products onto users people analytics teams should bring HR users into design thinking workshops to co-create the design of their dashboards and analytics products. If people have been involved in making the product they are more likely to use it.
Drive change in culture and literacy through hiring
Within people analytics the focus for building data literacy often leans towards upskilling existing colleagues. Whilst this is a worthwhile task and definitely something all People Analytics teams should be supporting I believe there has not been enough focus on using hiring as a way to build a data culture and stronger levels of literacy.
People analytics teams should work with recruitment and talent teams to help them build data literacy into their hiring criteria and assessment processes. Creating an exercise in interviews in which candidates need to analyse data and graphs and translate this into insights is a great way in which to ensure future new joiners will strengthen the data culture and literacy within HR.
Moreover, with new joiners bringing high levels of data literacy this will naturally help raise the level of your data culture and literacy within your existing workforce as new joiners can help coach, train and support the existing employees
Conclusion
To extract the value from people analytics requires more than just launching the technology and analytics products. It requires a comprehensive strategy to drive adoption on mass. However, traditional methods of driving adoption will only take companies so far, it is time to break the mould and try some new approaches to help realise the true potential of people analytics.