HR Analytics

HR Management Analytics underpins the soft part of Human Resources with hard facts. It does report and points to the strengths and weaknesses of people management practices in an organization. Today, employees are loyal just with organizations that represent their core values, make no compromises, and offer a unique and exciting employee experience.

The HR function was always perceived as a function without any numbers and analytics. No one required HR Managers to report hard facts. The leadership team was not expecting any value-added analytics from HR Managers because they were not able to deliver such a document. HR Managers and Specialists were talkative; they had no evidence in the form of numbers and proved hard facts.

It has never been a core HR competency and capability. Microsoft Excel was a tool to make lists, not sophisticated calculations. The need for advanced HR Analytics evolved. Leaders asked complex questions, and HR started to learn how to answer them correctly.

HR Analytics is a day to day job. It is about the introduction of a proper data analysis into Human Resources.

What do leaders require from Human Resources today?

Being and staying a successful company is a way more complicated than it used to be in the past. The world is interconnected, and competitors can come from other continents. It has changed the scope of leadership. Also, leaders need more and precise information and data from all business functions to make a quality decision.

Nowadays, leaders want to make fully informed and fact-based decisions. They want to see a proposal that connects all internal KPIs and puts them in perspective with external market trends. They want senior managers to discuss different options and propose the most promising one.

Leaders require detailed information about employee demographics in the business. They want to understand what employees think and what they believe.

They want to connect internal facts with external trends. They want to compare the organization with direct and indirect competitors. They want to understand how the business develops and how employees feel engaged.

They want to design high performing teams that will deliver highly competitive solutions. They need data and facts. This is the key objective of HR Analytics. It provides data, trends and forecasts to make sharp and high quality decisions.

Human Resources owns and administers large sets of employee data. It has access to many details about employees, and it can find highly relevant corelations between employees, performance and overall engagement of the workforce. However, the analytics capability was missing in the HR department.

HR Data have been overlooked for long time because Human Resources was not maintaing its data consistently. Usually, HR Information System was obsolete and its reporting and analytical capabilities lacked behind trends in analytics. It was one of the most critical HR analytics challenges.

Nowadays, collecting data is not an issue anymore. There are sophisticated solutions like machine learning that makes finding trends in large sets of data easy. In the past, most decisions were based on gut feeling, they can be fully supported by data, including the past development, possible future development and market trends.

Manage Positive Employee Experience

Today, the modern company put an emphasis on positive employee experience. It is not a new buzzword. It is the evolution of employee engagement, satisfaction and happiness. It is a complete program that redesing people management procedures and policies. It aims to provide a great experience from the beginning till the end of the employee lifecycle.

We believe that a positive employee experience turns into a positive customer experience. Satisfied customers do not search for other opportunities on the market; they are loyal with the company. It increases the probability of increased sales volumes. In the end, it translates into improved profitability of the business. That is why a positive employee experience is so important.

However, you cannot implement a new employee experience program without HR analytics. You need to understand HR processes and how they really work and perform before you can start implementing a new experience for employees.

People Analytics stands behind all positive changes in modern HR processes and procedures. It points at weak procedures and painful spots in processes. It works as the navigator for the team, that is dedicated to make a positive change happen. It supports the HR team in defing right and powerful HR Management KPIs that support the delivery of the HR strategy.

Why is HR Analytics important?

There is a simple example. One of the most common analytics questions the HR Manager can receive from the leadership team. What is the cost of turnover in our organization? Usually, we have no answer. We do not understand details of turnover. We just usually calculate the total turnover. We do not provide the business with any relevant details.

Answering the strategic HR Management question is impossible because we miss all the relevant data. We usually do not investigate issues in the organization deeper. We have no clear understanding of root causes.

Moreover, we do not understand what triggers turnover in the organization. We have no demographic data about employees who decided to leave. We do not have sufficient information about their performance and lenght of service.

HR Analytics supports fact based decision making. It allows managers and leaders understand all underlying trends to make a decision that will have the greatest positive impact on the workforce.

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