Returning to our theme, of using Customer Insight outside of Marketing. This time, we consider HR Analytics.
Such HR insight has become a growing focus in recent years & rightly so, in my opinion.
Both from the perspective of recruiting & retaining analytics talent , plus the potential for analytics to optimise key HR processes or decisions.
However, as I’ve spent more time this month meeting with analytics leaders from different organisations, it still appears that HR is rarely an application focus.
Plenty of organisations are yet to make sufficient use of analytics for sales and marketing. Applying analytics to HR decisions appears to be further along the maturity curve.
One of my learning points, from Barcelona conference , was the importance of encouraging and celebrating less advanced analytics. Improvements in data management & BI can still make important improvements to analytical thinking & evidence-based decisions. At such events, you become aware that organisations are at different levels of maturity & need to know how to get started.
Getting started with HR Analytics
For that reason, I was delighted to see this simple post from Tracey Smith . Overcoming the barrier of less analytics understanding/immature practice, she usefully sets out 13 ideas for how HR leaders could get started today.
Critically it helps leaders start to think of the right questions, that will help to both provide partial answers today and identify where data & analytics capabilities could be developed. I hope it helps you:
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The imagined future of HR Analytics
Another challenge for analytics leaders, trying to drive business change in HR, can be helping those leaders envision what could be done.
This simple piece from Arun Krishnan , helps suggest a way to achieve that, through the storytelling approach this blog has championed previously. A number of interesting themes for potential HR analytics application are suggested in the initial story & then explored in this post. Could this approach help you sell in the benefits?
But what if you are further along this analytics maturity curve. Do I have anything for you?
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HR Analytics meets the latest HR Tech developments
If you are ready to consider a wider set of HR application areas or more fundamental process or operating model redesign, then it’s worth considering the art of the possible. Alongside being very clear on your overall business strategy & how analytics aligns to that, it can help to inform your thinking with latest technology developments.
So, for those of you with more mature analytics capabilities or ready for this next step: This post from George Dickson should inspire your thinking. Writing for help Business 2 Community blog, he shares his “takeaways” from Annual HR Technology conference & expo in Chicago earlier this month.
I hope you found that useful, I particularly liked the themes of convergence & people centred design. Thinking through both of them should prompt other HR analytics application areas, beyond the classics of recruitment & talent management.
What will you do now?
Did that curated content help you? I hope so. But the key question, if you are going to get value out of the time you spent reading this post, is what are you going to do differently?
You read this post through, presumably because HR Analytics is either relevant to your organisation or you see the potential for it to be so. So, what action will you now take (within the next 2 weeks)? What one thing will you do differently as a result of what you’ve read?
As all good HR professional should espouse, if you don’t change anything then don’t expect any improvement in your performance.