Panasonic: Build your analytics foundations first

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We sat down with one of UNLEASH America’s stalwarts Lydia Wu, senior director of people strategy and operations at Panasonic Energy of North America.

We spoke about the need to get the basics right with analytics before experimenting with the ‘sexy stuff’, speaking the language of the business, and getting the research mindset.

Dan Cave: It’s a difficult budgetary and economic outlook at the moment — but businesses will still have a need for people analytics. How can HR adapt to do more with less in this area?

Lydia Wu: This moment has got to be about leaders understanding that your HR technology and analytics are the necessary foundations of your house. When leaders look at HR technology, analytics included, they look at the super sexy stuff: the AI, the chatbots, the user experiences, and the phenomenal delivery.

However, what they neglect to understand is the HR strategy, the actual blueprint design of the house, and when you build a house, you don’t start from the roof (all the super sexy stuff), you start from the foundation.

I think a lot of HR leaders focus on the roof of the house and neglect and not enough investment goes into the foundation of the house (the basic but important analytics).

I think as HR leaders in this economic environment this is a perfect opportunity for us to take a step back and really reground the business on what it’s going to take for us to have a solid foundation that’s going to carry us forward in the next 10 years.

And this is important for analytics leaders as we can’t analyze what we don’t measure.

DC: How can analytics leaders and practitioners take it back to the fundamentals then?

LW: We have to think about getting the right data to articulate what’s important to the business. I think a lot of times what analysts leaders and my peers truly struggle with is they do analytics, the really, really cool stuff but when they kind of look down at their foundation, it’s sort of that moment of realization in that I have to hold up a roof without the foundation under my feet.

That’s the struggle that analytics leaders are going through. They have to deliver really cool projects but they also have to fix and build a foundation at the same time. We need help to figure out how you have that solid foundation to deliver.

DC: What would it take to implement those fundamentals?

LW: I think over the last decade we have built some of those fundamentals but we’re building HR technology for HR people. And somehow from this, we expect HR to have a seat at the table!

When we do that the business is going to have a hard time understanding how to sync up everything we’re telling them they need to do.

How I’m looking at the challenge that’s facing me is: how do we build HR technology that’s actually supporting the business, as opposed to something that only a talent leader can use? How do you balance giving up a few of those user-friendly pieces on the talent side, to really focus on the delivery, the integration of data, and the connection to business systems?

What we really need to work on is how we measure productivity. That’s not something we can measure with just HR data and yet HR technology only captures HR data. So I think there’s a bit of an oxymoron in how we want HR to act in the business world being at the table.

DC: Productivity and technology is certainly a hot topic right now — especially with the applications such as ChatGPT sparking headlines. But is it going to make humans more productive or will it have a negative impact and herald an age of mass layoffs?

LW: Let’s put it out there: HR swims in the grey area. It’s my ultimate view that HR is about the workforce and we should never do harm to people.

So when I introduce any new technology or strategy it’s always with a ‘do no harm’ mantra. So my view is ChatGPT and others will be huge productivity boosters.

But that can only happen if HR has a seat around the table. And HR has to speak to vendors about the need for them to help us measure what the business needs. The business needs ROI on everything we do, which should be around building competencies and skillsets.

When you’re talking to your finance or IT leaders [showing new technologies can help] is how you ask for the investment to upskill your current workforce. That’s how with the rise of technology and with the rise of AI you make your workforce more productive to do more for the business and not end up in a place where we’re doing more with less.

DC: We’ve talked about HR needing to be more interested in speaking the business language, what about HR being generally more interested in the world around the function and wanting to research more?

LW: I think the research mindset should have been something that HR adopted years ago because we assume things about our workforce based on data. This is why doing analytics is such a dangerous job because by providing insights and data, without the right contacts, you’re inviting assumptions down the line.

I think to your point about research, HR should be on board. But I think it also goes beyond the research. What the research invites is a sense of curiosity and the removal of assumptions. And I think this day and age, having had that major shift over the last three years — that huge shift in workforce mentality, composition, and structure — we are in a bit of a new world, whether we like to admit it or not.

So, research is critical to whether we make it or we don’t make it as an HR function over the course of the next five to 10 years.

The International Festival of HR is back! Discover amazing speakers from the world of HR and business at UNLEASH America on 26-27 April 2023.