Action must follow analytics

During COVID-19, HR showed that it was a function of central business performance: delivering on keeping people safe, via quick and effective pivots to hybrid, digital and remote work.

The function kept operations going so the companies it operated in could keep being productive.

A corollary of the increase in digital work practices has been the increase in data that HR now has access to. But in order to use this data effectively, increasing numbers of practitioners believe that this must be turned into effective analytics — as well as follow-on strategies — in order to create organizational gains that deliver for everyone.

Analytics applications

In fact with analytics — a tool which is still in its infancy for many organizations — HR can deliver on leadership demand for better insights to inform decision-making, better strategic input, and better collation of information from different sources.

Done fantastically, this can be delivered in a way that delivers insights in an anytime anywhere fashion.

With a huge appetite for both better understanding, and then implementation, of people analytics, an HR Tech stage a panel of Samantha Woods, VP HR innovation lab, employee experience and employee attractiveness at Orange Business Services, Jason Averbook, CEO and co-founder at Leapgen and Evgeniia Tumanova, head of HR analytics group at Yandex was well placed to showcase how best to use data and analytics, create a framework for its use and governance, and ensure that it results in actions that improve work for everyone.

Firstly, as Tumanova told the UNLEASH World HR Tech stage audience there has to be an understanding of what HR analytics is: it’s about measuring the service that HR provides to its customer (the business and the workforce).

A crucial bit of insight for HR as many want to get started with analytics but just don’t know where.

Only then, added Woods, can the function start to understand the breadth of what it is able to measure, which is pretty much everything — from headcount to attrition rates and even employee emotions.

An important first step in improving all the verticals it looks after.

Woods: “Everything is data — even people’s emotions can be turned into data.”

She continued: “If I can’t measure it, I won’t do it.”

Averbrook agreed: “HR has got to get from counting people to making people count.”

Woods added that if HR can get its head around the breadth of what analytics is capable of then it can use this tool to begin to transform the business. An analytics practice can also help get HR that much sought-after ‘seat at the table’; the perennial issue the function has not always solved.

However — almost ironically — HR often has to try and get leadership buy-in for analytics investment before it can then use that analytics capability to win buy-in for future projects.

Therefore, a gameplan for this is important.

Another crucial part of building HR analytics capability has got to be around understanding the purpose of what the function wants to do with it, added Woods. Is it to keep top performers? Is it to improve the experience of work at its organization? Is it to improve workforce maturity?

What’s the ‘why’ of analytics?

This will differ from business to business but the purpose needs to be the analytics-building lodestar.

Only when it has a framework of understanding of what analytics is, what is it measuring, and what it is being implemented to do an HR then start to think about what analytics success looks like and might encompass.

Here the panel agreed that trust is a key part of success. Managers need to be given analytics tools and allowed to create solutions tailored to their teams and operational areas with it. HR, for want of another phrase, has to get out of the way once the tool has been created.

Another key part of making analytics work is around ensuring that the workforce isn’t overwhelmed by data-gathering exercises and that data is kept securely.

Tumanov explained that surveys should come during less stressful business periods and be done at the right intervals. At Yandex, she added they do quarterly pulse surveys and a yearly engagement survey

And, crucially, analytics must then be followed by action. This insight might seem obvious but the panel were unanimous in stipulating that if you’re asking your people for insights then this has to translate to improvements and change otherwise they will start asking ‘so what was the point?’

It is by then following an analytics-into-action flow that HR can start to improve the experience of work, boosting satisfaction and then starting to get into the very interesting space of predictive analytics and improvements across every HR vertical. All that is left then is to get started.