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HR Must Get people to Analytics More User-Friendly

Managing HR-related details are important to any organization’s success. And yet progress in HR analytics has been glacially slow. Consulting firms in 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 normally use “predictive analytics determined by HR data information off their sources within or outside the organization,” while 48% predicted they’d do so by 50 % years. The reality seems less impressive, as a global IBM survey of greater than 1,700 CEOs discovered that 71% identified human capital as a key supply of competitive advantage, yet a universal study by Tata Consultancy Services showed that only 5% of big-data investments were in hr.


Recently, my colleague Wayne Cascio and I used the issue of why HR Management Books Online has been 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 in the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance discusses factors that could effectively “push” HR measures and analysis to audiences in the more impactful way, as well as factors that could effectively lead others to “pull” that data for analysis through the entire organization.

About the “push” side, HR leaders are able to do a better job of presenting human capital metrics for the remaining portion of the organization while using LAMP framework:

Logic. Articulate the connections between talent and strategic success, as well as the principles and types of conditions that predict individual and organizational behaviors. For example, beyond providing numbers that describe trends in the demographic makeup of the job, improved logic might describe how demographic diversity affects innovation, or it may depict the pipeline of talent movement to exhibit what bottlenecks most affect career progress.
Analytics. Use appropriate tools and techniques to rework data into rigorous and relevant insights – statistical analysis, research design, etc. For example, understanding whether employee engagement causes higher work performance requires analysis beyond correlations that show the association, to be certain that the reason is not alone that better performers are more engaged.
Measures. Create accurate and verified numbers and indices calculated from data systems to serve as input for the analytics, in order to avoid having “garbage in” compromise in spite of appropriate and sophisticated analysis.
Process. Utilize right communication channels, timing, and methods to motivate decision makers to behave on data insights. For example, reports about employee engagement are often delivered once the analysis is done, however they are more impactful if they’re delivered during business planning sessions and when they deomonstrate the relationship between engagement and specific focus outcomes like innovation, cost, or speed.
Wayne and I observed that HR’s attention typically has been centered on sophisticated analytics and creating more-accurate and complete measures. Even most sophisticated and accurate analysis must don’t be lost in the shuffle since they can be baked into may framework which is understandable and highly relevant to decision makers (including showing the analogy between employee engagement and customer engagement), or by communicating it in a fashion that engages them through stories, analogies, and familiar examples. My colleague Ed Lawler and I compared the outcomes of surveys of greater than 100 U.S. HR leaders in 2013 and 2016 and found that HR departments that use each of the LAMP elements play a greater strategic role in their organizations. Balancing these four push factors creates a higher probability that HR’s analytic messaging will achieve the right decision makers.

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

receive the analytics with the perfect time as well as in the proper context
deal with the analytics and believe the analytics have value and that they are capable of using them
believe the analytics outcomes are credible and likely to represent their “real world”
perceive that this impact from the analytics is going to be large and compelling enough to justify their time and attention
understand that the analytics have specific implications for improving their very own decisions and actions
Achieving step up from these five push factors requires that HR leaders help decision makers comprehend the distinction between analytics that are centered on compliance versus HR departmental efficiency, versus HR services, as opposed to the impact of folks around the business, as opposed to the quality of non-HR leaders’ decisions and behaviors. Each of these has different implications for the analytics users. Yet most HR systems, scorecards, and reports fail to make these distinctions, leaving users to navigate a typically confusing and strange metrics landscape. Achieving better “push” implies that HR leaders in addition to their constituents have to pay greater care about the way users interpret the data they receive. For example, reporting comparative employee retention and engagement levels across business units will draw attention to those units where retention or engagement is lowest, middle, and highest (often depicted as red-yellow-green), plus a decision to emphasize increasing the “red” units. However, turnover and engagement tend not to affect all units exactly the same, and it will be that this most impactful decision is usually to make a green unit “even greener.” Yet we understand little or no about whether users fail to respond to HR analytics simply because they don’t believe the outcomes, simply because they don’t begin to see the implications as important, simply because they don’t learn how to respond to the outcomes, or some mixture of the 3. There exists hardly any research on these questions, and extremely few organizations actually conduct whatever user “focus groups” required to answer these questions.

A good here’s an example is if HR systems actually educate business leaders in regards to the quality of these human capital decisions. We asked this inquiry in the Lawler-Boudreau survey and consistently discovered that HR leaders rate this outcome of their HR and analytics systems lowest (around 2.5 with a 5-point scale). Yet higher ratings for this item are consistently connected with a stronger HR role in strategy, greater HR functional effectiveness, and higher organizational performance. Educating leaders in regards to the quality of these human capital decisions emerges as the most potent improvement opportunities in every survey we have conducted during the last Ten years.

To set HR data, measures, and analytics to work much better needs a more “user-focused” perspective. HR must pay more attention to the product features that successfully push the analytics messages forward also to the pull factors that create pivotal users to demand, understand, and employ those analytics. In the same way just about any website, application, and internet based technique is constantly tweaked as a result of data about user attention and actions, HR metrics and analytics should be improved by applying analytics tools for the buyer experience itself. Otherwise, all of the HR data on the planet won’t allow you to attract and retain the right talent to advance your organization forward.
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