Human resource management has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years. As a result, HR has begun to play a larger role in the business decision-making process. This transformation brought the need for analysing data by using scientific methods rather than relying on gut feeling.
In a recent edition of our Parichay webinar, three HR experts spoke about the importance of Data Driven HR and People Analytics. The panel featured Megha Gupta (Director‒HR), Finserv, Colin Mendes (Head of Human Resources), Voltas Beko, Samar Banerjee (Group Head‒Human Resources), Berger Paints India and Rajiv Naithani (EVP & Chief People Officer), Infogain. The engaging session was packed with lots of good reasons why HR analytics is of immense value to your business.
Six great reasons why you should invest in HR analytics.
HR has a new avatar
Gone are the days when HR was handling only payroll administration and managing employee records. Over the years, they have begun to take more strategic decisions for their respective organisations.
Leaders want to do more with less. Here’s where HR can do their bit to accelerate business growth. At the end of the day, it’s the people and skill sets that drive this growth. This is possible only if HR adopts a strategic mindset and helps decision making through data insights.
Numbers do the talking
Leaders measure team performance in terms of cost reduction, productivity, engagement, and compliance. HR can now deliver these metrics quickly thanks to digitalisation and people analytics.
Strategies pertaining to hiring, learning, engagement, and retention are not complete without the data on diversity, attrition, average tenure, and more. HR needs to connect the dots with an end-to-end approach for leveraging their data in the right manner. There's no better way to present the insights the leadership is expecting.
"It's not just about showing the data. It's about connecting the overall landscape of what's happening, in the organisation, through that data."
Megha Gupta, Director‒HR, Finserv
All eyes are on KPIs
HR needs to track dozens of KPIs related to recruitment, productivity, learning, wellness, engagement, and attrition. Therefore, they confront the challenge of choosing the relevant ones for decoding insights from the available data. The right analytics tools and methodologies can make these tasks easier.
Stakeholders are concerned about tracking and measuring KPIs like employee demographics, headcount efficiency, retention, risk factors, staff cost and more. Although there are ways to extract data from multiple sources, it’s the optimisation that makes it useful and actionable.
"The power of analytics depends on how we want to use it. It has to define what is urgent, what is important and what I need to do right now."
Colin Mendes, Head of Human Resources, Voltas Beko
Productivity begins with clarity
When it comes to measuring team member productivity, the 'what' and 'how' parts of the job matter a lot. Also, the outcome has to be clearly defined beforehand.
"Analytics can aggregate a lot of insights and help leaders become more effective while managing their own behaviours better."
Rajiv Naithani, EVP & Chief People Officer, Infogain
A 360-degree view of an individual's performance is essential for accurate assessment of individual and team performance. Today’s advanced analytics tools and HR software solutions help identify the gaps to enable productivity enhancement.
Attrition. A cause for concern.
What happens if a set of people decide to put in their papers all of a sudden? No doubt it’s a challenge for the hiring team, but it’s something that can be averted! HR analytics, predictive analytics in particular, can help identify the employees who are likely to leave. HR can apply the results to make a suitable decision for retention or hiring.
"You cannot just sit with the data. You have to start working on it."
Samar Banerjee, Group Head‒Human Resources, Berger Paints India
Different employees have different reasons for leaving an organisation. HR can run periodic surveys and conduct sentiment analysis to spot the locations with high attrition rates. The data can also be analysed to reveal the specific reasons for the same.
Automation. The new query language.
Manual queries have been handled by HR shared services, a dedicated team of people who resolve queries. Now the same team is expected to address a massive number of advanced automated queries at a faster pace.
If an employee wants to know the leave balance, AI, ML and chatbots get to work for answering it in real-time. The good news is that the market has a plethora of analytics tools to automate several other HRMS processes.
Concluding Thoughts
HR analytics can reveal a lot of meaningful insights that are available but not fully visible. If the right HR software systems, tools and processes are used, HR can think beyond what they can see. But the stakeholders have to shortlist the key decisions that should be driven by data.
We have distilled the key discussion points here. But, if you can spare some time, there is nothing like hearing it directly from the experts.
