Human Resources have finally gained its importance in majority of the organizations. With the advent of people analytics, the function has evolved from a nice-to-have to a must-have for most leading firms. Though, it is a herculean task to collect and clean data and then integrate it with aligned processes of the organization, it has become a useful activity for the HR managers.
A recent survey by HR.com, undertakes a wide range of organizations to understand how and what are they doing well with people analytics. They also cover the criteria relevant for the successful integration of this information with the organization’s operations. Few key points of the survey are mentioned here:
- Only 36% of the respondents were convinced about their people analytics leading to actionable insights. Majority of them are either struggling or moderately able to convert their information into positive changes.
- Another major finding was that HR analytics is better at providing insights to HR managers rather than other stakeholders like line managers and employees.
- One resonant observation from this study says that organizations are more inclined towards the descriptive part of HR analytics as compared to the more refined predictive and prescriptive analytics.
- The intense part of people analytics comes from the data integration, cleaning and visualization aspect.
- Majority of the data analytics information is shared with the top level through dashboards in comparison to the traditional methods of email or printed reports. The top choices by the managers are interactive visualizations and graphic presentations like PowerPoint slides.
- Major players of HR analytics are effective in providing insights to top leaders, make moderate use of predictive analytics, integrate non-HR data with HR data, use HR analytics software. Their focus lies on moderate use of prescriptive analytics and perform smoothly on data cleaning and integration with other functions.
Whatsoever be the scenario, people analytics is here to stay. The closest integration that HR can do is with finance or operations. Relating finance and HR data assists in addressing talent management issues related to sales, profitability, shareholder value, cash flow, customer retention rates etc. In terms of operations, HR can seek the impact of absenteeism on productivity, customer experiences, ticket resolution time and the like. Another common usage of people analytics is conversion of data and information into insights that matter to the performance of the business. The technologies used are a blend of old and new tools like spreadsheets, built-in HCMS/ HRIS system or software packages and data-friendly programming languages like R and Python. At Jaipuria Institute of Management, Ghaziabad, our focus is on the digital learning of students, preparing them to be industry-ready in terms of understanding data and make a useful sense out of it.
Guneet Kaur
Assistant Professor
Jaipuria Institute of Management, Ghaziabad
