[Blog 12] How to Enhance the Usefulness of Your HR Analytics

With big data highlighting trends, patterns and relationships in various fields, from marketing to finance, playing a huge role in numerous operations, it is no surprise that the same for big data goes for HR. HR analytics not only helps to identify turnover spikes, areas of consistent employee complaints, it also helps to measure the effectiveness of new hires, policies implemented and their outcomes, enabling HR teams to predict with greater accuracy which interview candidate would be a good fit for the company, and when employees will leave the company.

HR consultancy teams however, can take further steps to enhance the usefulness of their big data in a HR advisor role.

First, they must ensure data quality. Similar metrics must be measured the same way and organised the same way for consistency and coherence. Differently-formatted data samples require time investment for manual sifting through and scrubbing before they can be utilised in data analytics. A company wants context to the numbers and measurements collated, and it wants it fast. In this digital landscape, a company must continuously revolutionise itself to keep up with its competitors, and to do so it must agilely collect feedback, interpret it, craft solutions and implement them rapidly. Without reliable data, patterns and findings drawn become ineffective for solving the problem.

Second, they must map their metrics to their goals. The information measured must be critical, not trivial. What issues are they looking to uncover, what do they want to find out and why? These are important questions to consider even during the data collection process. The realm of HR is entering a paradigm shift, and data collection is not nearly enough – HR executives must be skilled in data interpretation as well. Interpretation is the bridge between data and real-world applicability. They must competently spot trends as well as shift through unstructured, even random data, such as social media comments, video or images that can yield understanding about how people think about your company. Keeping the big picture in mind will aid significantly in collecting useful data and gleaning powerful insights.

The benefits obtained from data analysis must be proliferated throughout the organisation. Any crucial insight gained is applicable to even the individual employee, and especially so for newer and advanced systems by top vendors such as Oracle, SAP, SumTotal Systems and PeopleFluent. These can not only yield general insights for the company as a whole, but offer personalised suggestions to each employee regarding the training they should go for, trends in their performance so far as well as what they can do to improve their performance and better contribute to the company. Extracting as much benefit as possible from your HR results can yield multiplied benefit compared to, say, limiting it to upper management.

While big data can be difficult to master, HR analytics can help to solve real business challenges driven by the workforce, and thus deliver real revenue or cost savings to the business’ bottom line. To facilitate the use of big data in HR, HR teams can thus map out insights that they wish to glean through big data, making it more focused and easier to handle.