HR Must Make People Analytics More User-Friendly

Managing HR-related information is essential to any organization’s success. Yet progress in HR analytics has been glacially slow. Consulting firms from the U.S. and Europe lament the slow progress. But a Harvard Business Review analytics study of 230 executives suggests a sensational rate of anticipated progress: 15% said they use “predictive analytics based on HR data and data using their company sources within or outside the business,” while 48% predicted they would do so by 50 % years. The truth seems less impressive, being a global IBM survey of more than 1,700 CEOs found out that 71% identified human capital being a key source of competitive advantage, yet a universal study by Tata Consultancy Services showed that only 5% of big-data investments were in human resources.


Recently, my colleague Wayne Cascio and that i required the question of why Buy HR Management Books has been so slow despite many decades of research and practical tool building, an exponential rise in available HR data, and consistent evidence that improved HR and talent management contributes to stronger organizational performance. Our article from the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and satisfaction discusses factors that may effectively “push” HR measures and analysis to audiences in a more impactful way, as well as factors that may effectively lead others to “pull” that data for analysis through the organization.

On the “push” side, HR leaders can perform a better job of presenting human capital metrics for the remaining organization while using LAMP framework:

Logic. Articulate the connections between talent and strategic success, along with the principles and types of conditions that predict individual and organizational behaviors. As an example, beyond providing numbers that describe trends from the demographic makeup of a job, improved logic might describe how demographic diversity affects innovation, or it will depict the pipeline of talent movement to exhibit what bottlenecks most affect career progress.
Analytics. Use appropriate techniques and tools to remodel data into rigorous and relevant insights – statistical analysis, research design, etc. As an example, understanding whether employee engagement causes higher work performance requires analysis beyond correlations that show the association, to make certain that this is because not alone that better performers be engaged.
Measures. Create accurate and verified numbers and indices calculated from data systems for everyone as input for the analytics, in order to avoid having “garbage in” compromise despite appropriate and complicated analysis.
Process. Utilize the right communication channels, timing, and methods to motivate decision makers to act on data insights. As an example, reports about employee engagement tend to be delivered right after the analysis is done, nonetheless they be impactful if they’re delivered during business planning sessions if they show the relationship between engagement and particular focus outcomes like innovation, cost, or speed.
Wayne and that i observed that HR’s attention typically has been focused on sophisticated analytics and creating more-accurate and complete measures. Even most sophisticated and accurate analysis must avoid getting lost from the shuffle since they can be baked into could possibly framework that’s understandable and relevant to decision makers (for example showing the analogy between employee engagement and customer engagement), or by communicating it in a way that engages them through stories, analogies, and familiar examples. My colleague Ed Lawler and that i compared the outcome of surveys of more than 100 U.S. HR leaders in 2013 and 2016 and found that HR departments designed to use all of the LAMP elements play a greater strategic role in their organizations. Balancing these four push factors produces a higher probability that HR’s analytic messaging will attain the right decision makers.

On the pull side, Wayne and that i suggested that HR and also other organizational leaders take into account the necessary conditions for HR metrics and analytics information to have through to the pivotal audience of decision makers and influencers, who must:

obtain the analytics on the proper time along with the proper context
tackle the analytics and believe the analytics have value and that they are equipped for with them
believe the analytics answers are credible and certain to represent their “real world”
perceive that this impact in the analytics will probably be large and compelling enough to warrant time and a focus
understand that the analytics have specific implications for improving their own decisions and actions
Achieving improvement on these five push factors mandates that HR leaders help decision makers understand the contrast between analytics which might be focused on compliance versus HR departmental efficiency, versus HR services, compared to the impact of folks about the business, compared to the quality of non-HR leaders’ decisions and behaviors. All these has completely different implications for that analytics users. Yet most HR systems, scorecards, and reports don’t make these distinctions, leaving users to navigate a frequently confusing and strange metrics landscape. Achieving better “push” means that HR leaders and their constituents must pay greater awareness of the best way users interpret the information they receive. As an example, reporting comparative employee retention and engagement levels across business units will naturally draw attention to those units where retention or engagement is lowest, middle, and highest (often depicted as red-yellow-green), along with a decision to stress helping the “red” units. However, turnover and engagement usually do not affect all units the same way, and it will be that this most impactful decision is usually to produce a green unit “even greener.” Yet we realize very little about whether users don’t respond to HR analytics since they don’t believe the outcome, since they don’t see the implications as vital, since they don’t learn how to respond to the outcome, or some mix of seventy one. There is certainly almost no research on these questions, and very few organizations actually conduct the user “focus groups” required to answer these questions.

A fantastic here’s an example is if HR systems actually educate business leaders regarding the quality of these human capital decisions. We asked this from the Lawler-Boudreau survey and consistently found out that HR leaders rate this results of their HR and analytics systems lowest (about 2.5 on the 5-point scale). Yet higher ratings with this item are consistently connected with a stronger HR role in strategy, greater HR functional effectiveness, far better organizational performance. Educating leaders regarding the quality of these human capital decisions emerges as one of the strongest improvement opportunities in every single survey we have conducted during the last 10 years.

That will put HR data, measures, and analytics to function more efficiently requires a more “user-focused” perspective. HR should be more conscious of the product features that successfully push the analytics messages forward and the pull factors that induce pivotal users to demand, understand, and use those analytics. In the same way just about any website, application, an internet-based product is constantly tweaked in response to data about user attention and actions, HR metrics and analytics must be improved by utilizing analytics tools for the user experience itself. Otherwise, all the HR data in the world won’t help you attract and support the right talent to maneuver your small business forward.
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