feature | DECISION SCIENCE
IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE…!
HR leaders are resigned to the reality that there is not enough analytics talent to go round. There is only one solution, they are going to have to create it. With data forming almost all decisions and strategies, there is no other choice.
ARTICLE BY SIMON FOWLER CEO XCD
ccording to the University of California, global demand for data scientists already exceeds the available talent pool by over 50 percent. With those numbers in mind, you don’t need to be a statistical expert to see that chances of hiring top data talent are obscenely slim - unless you’re willing to pay top-dollar. Instead of drafting in one highly paid data scientist, the logical step is to build a team of HRBPs, with enough basic analytical skill to leverage their granular knowledge of your organisation’s people, processes and culture. It starts, like everything, with strategy and objectives. HR objectives should, of course, align with the wider business strategy - we’ve heard it so much it’s almost become a cliché. But in terms of strategic execution, it's HR’s role to ensure the organisational design, talent, performance and culture are aligned too. Last year, the leadership consultancy DDI revealed that c-suite confidence in HR’s ability to leverage data had fallen for a third consecutive year and that can only be put down to the lack of capability. Indeed, people analytics projects have struggled to prove their value outside of the people management niche. This is often a question of mindset - HR specific initiatives with HR specific objectives tend to solve only HR specific problems. Which is why it’s better for people analytics to be viewed as a business initiative. This seems like a small distinction, but viewed from a wider angle, the same questions deliver greater business and boardroom relevance. Instead of looking at HR measurements - KPIs like engagement or absence - a business initiative formulates questions about productivity or sales performance. Although both approaches incorporate much of the same data, how you ask is almost as important as the question itself. There is some bad news, to deliver game-changing value with analytics, you have to consider that analytics isn’t the first step. It isn’t even the second or third step. It is platform choice and data competency that are non-negotiable foundations for value-driving people analytics. Here’s the good news, assuming your HR technology is up-to-date, is that modern tools are basically supercharged calculators. They run on data and do much of the heavy technical lifting for you. But like any high-performance engine, they won’t operate effectively - or at all - on dirty fuel. For building your in-house analytics capabilities, your people need to learn how to think in data analysis terms. Author and data guru Tom Redman, aka “the Data Doc”, advises businesses to motivate their people to start using data, by formulating a question about issues that directly affect them, then use data to provide an answer. Here’s Redman’s brilliantly simple example: “Meetings always seem to start late. Is this really true? ‘Yes’ or ‘no’ isn’t really the point. The point in analytics is ‘why’”? If 60 percent of meetings start late, how much time is wasted? How much does that cost the business if you extrapolate across an entire year? Are there variations that suggest correlation? If so, which factors matter most, and which can be ignored? How do those factors interact with each other? Crucially, what do they suggest in terms of possible improvements? Tracking and analysing data to apply basic analytical principles provides the grounding your team will need to apply simple people analytics to their organisation. For instance, we could quite easily build an employee churn risk model. Flags might include; a decreasing performance score or negative personal development review, short-notice holidays or an increase in single-day sickness. In isolation, these may seem innocuous, but in combination on a timeline, they can highlight trends and provide a useful early indication of risk. Or let’s say an organisation is considering a proposal involving the closure of offices, with all the thorny issues that entails - re-location, rehires, retention, knowledge transfer
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50 | thehrdirector | DECEMBER 2019
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