Even in times of economic uncertainty, you still need to take smart steps if you'd like to avoid losing your top talent. Fortunately, people analytics have come a long way in the past decade and can help you maintain a flexible and scalable human resources strategy.
According to a recent study, 70% of organizations are now using people analytics. But perhaps not surprisingly, only 29% say they’re good at making positive changes based on those analytics. In this blog, we’ll explore the evolution of people analytics, how to assess your organization’s people analytics capabilities, and how you can harness the full power of people analytics to attract and retain talent.
What Is (and Was) People Analytics?
Feel free to skip over this section if you’re already well-versed in this field!
People analytics, which refers to the use of talent data to improve business outcomes, traces its roots back to 1911 and the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management. Inspired in part by Theodore Roosevelt and the conservation movement, author and mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor sought to bring attention to business practices that wasted yet another precious natural resource: human labor.
Over the past ten years, however, people analytics has transformed from operational reporting and historical HR reports to service centers handling individual needs. In fact, people analytics has become a core component of business strategy, and technology solutions have enabled high-impact, customized HR people-focused analytics by moving static HR management platforms to more dynamic, real-time, cloud, and mobile-based tools and by integrating digital work experience.
Today, the functions of people analytics have been pushed to new levels of urgency and higher standards of accuracy. From daily operational decisions to long-term strategic scenario planning, people analytics supports any industry or operating model through agility. It enables smart adjustments to talent management strategy from several lenses: diversity, core values, and interests, to name a few.
There’s just one problem: many organizations lack the analytic maturity to reap the full benefits of people analytics.
Common People Analytics Challenges
Depending on where your organization is in its analytic maturity, you may face a few of these common challenges:
- Many organizations are in the initial stages of analytic maturity and rely on Excel solutions and IT teams to obtain HR data
- Data is decentralized making it difficult for organizations to make strategic decisions around hiring and retaining employees
- There’s a lack of support from business leaders to drive change, not only within HR, but across the organization
- Talent requirements are changing, and competition is at an all-time high
These challenges may be common, but they are also avoidable. A comprehensive approach of combining the right talent, the right practices, and the right technology can predict trends, generate insights, and deliver quick results.
Has Your Organization Kept Up?
Most organizations have applied a people analytics lens for many years, but that does not mean every organization is at the same level of analytic maturity.
There are different maturity levels when it comes to the adoption of people analytics, ranging from simple reporting to sophisticated predictive analytics, from metrics benchmarking dashboards to presenting key performance indicators (KPI) trends, from predicting risks like attrition rate to making workforce planning business decisions. These levels of maturity depend on several factors including organizations’ business objectives, executive buy-in, financial resources, etc.
The Benefits of a Modern People Analytics Strategy
By maturing your practice all the way to a prescriptive data level, you will be better prepared to face challenges all companies will face over the coming years, including increased market competition, the high demand for skills, the war on talent, and an ever-changing regulatory environment, to name a few.
You’ll also see a number of benefits.
1. Use Technology More Efficiently
A well-managed data infrastructure can ensure complete data capture by integrating data from multiple HR and business systems, drastically decreasing time spent on repetitive analytics.
A new breed of HR technologies and solutions is entering the market. These tools are built around mobile technology, AI, cognitive processing, and consumer-like experiences, enabling HR analytics to become near-real time. Implementing and using these tools will give you a pulse on how your team is doing and help you identify patterns of challenges getting in the way of performance or retention – allowing you to proactively address those challenges.
2. Drive Organizational Effectiveness
Stakeholders and leadership champions are the keys to this concept. Leadership engagement outside of human resources will accelerate people analytics solutions, harness technology prowess, and deliver significant business value. By obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders and implementing change management best practices, you will strengthen your data frequency, decisions, and results.
3. Attract and Retain Top Talent
The requirements of talent are changing quickly. With mature people analytics capabilities, you will be able to predict future talent pipelines, enhance diversity solutions, and influence the employer brand. You will understand factors that influence and predict employee attraction, retention, engagement, and productivity. With this in your toolset, you will be able to make strategic decisions around the management and acquisition of talent.
How To Increase Your People Analytics Capabilities
Data is necessary to inform, transform, and empower HR decisions. By implementing diagnostic methods, such as a metrics dashboard, you will understand why something happened.
Take it a step further with advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning, and you will gain insight into not just what will happen but how it will happen.
Making Your Next Steps Easier
At Pioneer, we take a holistic approach to helping our clients harness the full power of people analytics to help drive business performance and value. Not only can we help you jumpstart your capabilities or modernize your data platforms, we can also create an executive analytics hub to make it easier than ever to get the most from your data.
Through our 3 phases: Strategy & Planning, Data & Prototype, and Hub Development, we’ll help you revolutionize your approach to analytics, HR processes will be automated, and a reliable scorecard catered to each level of your organization's specific needs.
If you’d like to advance your people analytics capabilities, our elite team can partner with you to help you achieve your short- and long-term goals. Connect with a Pioneer to get started!
