HR Must Make People Analytics More User-Friendly

Managing HR-related info is critical to any organization’s success. Nevertheless progress in HR analytics may be glacially slow. Consulting firms inside the U.S. and Europe lament the slow progress. But a Harvard Business Review analytics study of 230 executives suggests a stunning rate of anticipated progress: 15% said they use “predictive analytics according to HR data and data off their sources within and out the business,” while 48% predicted they might be going after so by 50 % years. The reality seems less impressive, being a global IBM survey greater than 1,700 CEOs learned that 71% identified human capital being a key supply of competitive advantage, yet a worldwide study by Tata Consultancy Services indicated that only 5% of big-data investments were in human resources.


Recently, my colleague Wayne Cascio and I began the issue of why HR Management Books Online may be so slow despite many decades of research and practical tool building, an exponential surge in available HR data, and consistent evidence that improved HR and talent management brings about stronger organizational performance. Our article inside the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance discusses factors that will effectively “push” HR measures and analysis to audiences inside a more impactful way, and also factors that will effectively lead others to “pull” that data for analysis through the entire organization.

On the “push” side, HR leaders are able to do a more satisfactory job of presenting human capital metrics on the remaining portion of the organization while using LAMP framework:

Logic. Articulate the connections between talent and strategic success, along with the principles and scenarios that predict individual and organizational behaviors. As an example, beyond providing numbers that describe trends inside the demographic makeup of your job, improved logic might describe how demographic diversity affects innovation, or it may depict the pipeline of talent movement to demonstrate what bottlenecks most affect career progress.
Analytics. Use appropriate tools and techniques to transform 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 be sure that the reason is not simply that better performers are more engaged.
Measures. Create accurate and verified numbers and indices calculated from data systems for everyone as input on the analytics, in order to avoid having “garbage in” compromise despite appropriate and complicated analysis.
Process. Utilize right communication channels, timing, and techniques to motivate decision makers to act on data insights. As an example, reports about employee engagement will often be delivered as soon as the analysis is fully gone, however they are more impactful if they’re delivered during business planning sessions if they show the relationship between engagement and specific focus outcomes like innovation, cost, or speed.
Wayne and I observed that HR’s attention typically may be devoted to sophisticated analytics and creating more-accurate and finished measures. Perhaps the most sophisticated and accurate analysis must avoid being lost inside the shuffle when you’re a part of a logical framework which is understandable and strongly related decision makers (including showing the analogy between employee engagement and customer engagement), or by communicating it in ways that engages them through stories, analogies, and familiar examples. My colleague Ed Lawler and I compared the results of surveys greater than 100 U.S. HR leaders in 2013 and 2016 and discovered that HR departments which use each of the LAMP elements play a stronger strategic role of their organizations. Balancing these four push factors produces a higher probability that HR’s analytic messaging will achieve the right decision makers.

On the pull side, Wayne and I suggested that HR along with other organizational leaders consider the necessary conditions for HR metrics and analytics information to acquire right through to the pivotal audience of decision makers and influencers, who must:

receive the analytics in the correct time plus the best context
focus on the analytics and think that the analytics have value and they also can handle with these
believe the analytics answers are credible and likely to represent their “real world”
perceive the impact in the analytics will be large and compelling enough to justify time and attention
understand that the analytics have specific implications for improving their unique decisions and actions
Achieving step up from these five push factors makes it necessary that HR leaders help decision makers understand the distinction between analytics which are devoted to compliance versus HR departmental efficiency, versus HR services, versus the impact of individuals about the business, versus the quality of non-HR leaders’ decisions and behaviors. All these has completely different implications for your analytics users. Yet most HR systems, scorecards, and reports fail to make these distinctions, leaving users to navigate a frequently confusing and strange metrics landscape. Achieving better “push” means that HR leaders in addition to their constituents should pay greater attention to the way in which users interpret the info they receive. As an example, reporting comparative employee retention and engagement levels across sections will highlight those units where retention or engagement is lowest, middle, and highest (often depicted as red-yellow-green), plus a decision to emphasise increasing the “red” units. However, turnover and engagement do not affect all units much the same way, and it will be the most impactful decision is usually to make a green unit “even greener.” Yet we all know very little about whether users fail to act on HR analytics given that they don’t believe the results, given that they don’t start to see the implications as vital, given that they don’t know how to act on the results, or some combination of all three. There is without any research on these questions, and extremely few organizations actually conduct the sort of user “focus groups” needed to answer these questions.

A fantastic just to illustrate is whether HR systems actually educate business leaders concerning the quality of the human capital decisions. We asked this inside the Lawler-Boudreau survey and consistently learned that HR leaders rate this outcome of their HR and analytics systems lowest (about 2.5 on the 5-point scale). Yet higher ratings on this item are consistently of a stronger HR role in strategy, greater HR functional effectiveness, and higher organizational performance. Educating leaders concerning the quality of the human capital decisions emerges among the most powerful improvement opportunities in every survey we’ve conducted within the last Decade.

That will put HR data, measures, and analytics to operate more effectively takes a more “user-focused” perspective. HR should pay more attention to the item features that successfully push the analytics messages forward and to the pull factors that create pivotal users to demand, understand, and use those analytics. Just as practically every website, application, and internet based strategy is constantly tweaked as a result of data about user attention and actions, HR metrics and analytics ought to be improved through the use of analytics tools on the buyer itself. Otherwise, all the HR data on the planet won’t help you attract and support the right talent to move your business forward.
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