Adam Nuckley
London, United Kingdom
How To Build Your Confidence InHR Analytics
"Adam Nuckley, Reward Consultant at Innecto Reward Consulting communicates Golden rules ofHR Analytics how to build your confidence in HR Analytics."
Is HR relevant to your business? The answer is of course yes. If you don’t believe HR can have a positive,strategic impact on your business through helping it get the most out of its most important (and expensive)asset, then you may as well as go home and start looking for a new role. But do you regularly demonstrate thatrelevance to the business?
Think about other functions in your organisation. What does Finance do? How does it work? My guess is that itis fairly well-regarded. They are the people to go to understand the money, costs, revenue, and sales successor failure. They have a place at the top table, a solid reputation, credibility and independence.
What would you think if Marketing ran a promotional campaign and the Marketing Director couldn’t back upits success with measurable outputs, but reported that he had ‘heard good things’ anecdotally? They are usingsolid data with a link to the business to show the relevance of what they do.
How Do You Establish Credibility?So what can we learn from that in HR? Can we develop a strength in creating an architecture around people inthe same way? Does it count to our detriment when there isn’t an easy answer to our fundamental question;“how are our people performing and how can we make that better?”
HR analytics purports to be that answer. Not only can it gather descriptive analytics, rear-view mirror stuff, butalso shows us how we can predict the future through predictive analytics. The view is that HR analytics mightwork for huge firms with a massive data set – the Googles of this world, but most of us work in smallerorganisations without access to ‘big data’ or in the public sector whose track record on data management ispoor and un-integrated.
Ask yourself; what would be different for you if you could reliably track and report on key bits of People data?
Every Journey Starts With A Single StepDeveloping HR analytics takes time, so the key message is always stay calm, start small, be patient, and buildover time.
If you’re doing nothing at the moment and/or aren’t too confident working with data, it’s counterproductive tosuddenly try and tackle everything. There are potentially hundreds of things you could look at, but trying to doeverything will leave you overwhelmed with too much information, losing focus, and letting analytics fall by thewayside as too hard. Instead start looking at only a few measures. You can add others over time as you buildyour confidence and get to know your data.
The 'Golden Rules' Of HR AnalyticsAs you build your HR analytics capability there are four ‘golden rules’ you need to bear in mind if you are to besuccessful:
1. Interpret Your DataAnalytics is the interpretation of data to generate insight. Your data is not analytics, your HR system isnot analytics, and your reports are not analytics. These are only tools to allow you to look for trends inyour data, ask questions to understand the drivers for those trends, and find how it impacts on thebusiness.
2. Link to the businessAnalytics should always be linked to the business. Every organisation fundamentally wants to know fourthings: where is our money coming in from (revenue), where are we spending our money (cost), howwe can we best deliver our product/service (business plan), and what are the obstacles to doing this(critical problems).
If you want to show relevance to the business and build your credibility, then any insight you share fromyour data has to be linked to one of these four things. This can be done by identifying a specific currentbusiness problem or goal and finding how you can provide insight and support from HR’s perspective,or by simply putting a £ value on your numbers. If you talk about reducing average sickness by a dayper employee, you get blank looks, but if you can talk about saving the business £100,000 you arelinking your work to the bottom line and showing why the Exec team should care.
3. Embrace The Power Of Beta
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Everyone has bad data even Google, the ‘kings’ of HR analytics. The majority of companies actingupon their data are fighting a never-ending battle to improve and maintain its quality. But, your datadoesn’t have to be 100% or even 80% complete to be useful. It’s easy to get bogged down in improvingyour data quality or refining the output but don’t be put off actually delivering an output to the business.
‘Beta’ is a product development term referring to the stage where you share your product with a wideraudience to get real life feedback and find all the bugs and kinks before your official launch. Use this‘work in progress’ tag to take your work out to the business and ask for feedback. If you admit it’s beingworked on and invite managers’ collaboration to help improve it, you create a positive workingrelationship from the start.
4. Be Transparent And OpenHR analytics sits in HR, but should not stay there; transparency and best practice HR analytics gohand in hand. Open communication of analytics is what will help it thrive and succeed; your long-termgoal should be to create a culture of collaboration and interpretation of data between HR and thebusiness. My experience is that this can take years so be patient, but if HR analytics stays strictlyguarded inside the HR silo, then it will die there.
Your next steps
Take charge: have a central person or small team who ‘own’ HR analyticsStart slow: keep it simple to build confidence and avoid overloadFind your business problem: solving a business problem gains you credibility and typically at least onesupporter on the Exec.
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