In today's fast-moving and competitive environment, to succeed and help the organization grow faster, most of the HR leaders and top executives are taking HR Analytics seriously. Organizations are aware it's people who bring success to their business and that is why HR Analytics Team maturity stage plays a big role in yielding the positive outcome. There are six stages of HR Analytics Team maturity level which we will demystify in this article.
So, the question is at what stage, we should consider that an organization is serious about HR Analytics Journey?
In some medium to large scale Organizations, multiple teams work in silos. They are usually given responsibility to manage the specific division, business unit or country. Such organizations usually struggle to provide timely basic analysis on global headcount, attrition, promotion trend etc. This is due to poor collaboration, KPI localization, governance and different ways of working within the organization.
At this stage of the journey, the organization chose to provide a central team to efficiently manage the end to end HR Analytics processes. This exercise includes bringing all analytics processes from HR System Wheel (e.g. Recruiting, Onboarding, Personnel Administration, Org Management, L&D, Performance and Rewards, Talent Management, Succession and Career planning, Employee Engagement etc.) at one single platform to meet the need of organization-wide HR Analytics.
In the second stage of the journey, the team usually take input from respective HR leaders or Senior Leadership to discuss their present and prospective hr analytical needs. The team then standardize and finalize the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) definitions at organization level either under the guidance of leadership or by decoding industry standard. At this phase, team decommissions the obsolete dashboards and meets the leadership need through improved and meaningful standard KPI based HR Analytics dashboards.
This is the stage where most of the organization introduces self-service HR Analytics dashboard by deploying business intelligence and visualization tool.
Without insight and storytelling, you are leaving the outcome of your findings for self-interpretation. At the third stage of HR Analytics team journey, they try to answer 'what has happened?'(descriptive) from current and past data. It is also expected that team provides insight on 'why it has happened' (Diagnostic) either by doing data mining, looking at the trend or by directly working with businesses and HRBPs where the event has occurred. A surge of +10% in involuntary attrition may be normal for one leader however it may raise alarm for others however it is team responsibility to track down why it has happened and give clarity if they should be worried or it's normal. Your team members must be equipped with the intermediate level of descriptive statistical knowledge along with the good presentation, communication and storytelling skill.
Everyone is interested in knowing the future and why not? that is one of the key triggers, organizations do setup Analytics team. The goal of HR Analytics team at this fourth stage is to provide insights on 'what will happen?' in future by looking at different variables, historical data, seasonal trend etc. The team should be equipped with the skill such as writing statistical algorithms, building and validating statistical models, machine learning etc. This helps the organization in detecting potential fraud, turnover, cultural changes, policy breach, training usefulness etc. in advance. Your HR Analytics team must also supplement resources who can convert statistical outcome into business language.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, "All good thoughts and ideas mean nothing without Action".
At this stage of the journey, HR Analytics team provides the best course of action along with persistent follow-up based on their predictive/forecasting model outcome. For example, If a high performer is a potential leaver as per predictive model due to monotony at work as one of the key factors. Can HR or business leaders address the concern in advance by moving the employee to other role or discussing his career plan? This requires your team to have a day to day business understanding, domain expertise, strong business communication skill, ability to translate statistical outcome into business language, storytelling ability etc.
Big data and Advanced Analytics are no longer a buzz word, it's getting into reality even in HR world. The organizations have wealth of data in the unstructured form which they have not been able to use in absence of technology. Today it is possible to do analytics from voluminous unstructured data such as Employee CV, Data from other business domain(Finance, IT etc.), social media, emails, audio and video conversation etc. Market leaders like Google, IBM, Xerox are already leveraging the potential of these technology for People/HR Analytics. Companies are also taking data from human wearable devices to track various information for better employee level predictions. It is helping organizations in taking precise decisions for future. HR Analytics team requires advance infrastructure and Big Data scientists to withstand at this level of maturity.
This brings me to the end of this topic and I hope this may have given you some idea of HR Analytics Team Maturity Journey at different stages.
I will look forward to your opinion on this blog.