Discover more from HRHeadStart

In a world of information overload and filter-failure, I focus on helping HR students and young professionals by curating insights about what matters in the world of work, the new talent agenda and fueling curiosity. Welcome to smarter!

HRHeadStart #56: Making Workforce Analytics Work

Jan 17, 2023

The Talent Agenda

HR Analytics has tremendous potential to enhance leaders’ and HR’s decision-making on human and organizational capital. It helps to supplement intuition with evidence. Without analytics, a world full of information becomes meaningless. Yet, the way HR Analytics is practiced (if at all!) is typically quite inside-out and HR-centric. In many cases, the emphasis stays at the bottom of the analytics maturity curve (i.e. Descriptive Analytics) which leads to HR creating metrics and dashboard on the most fundamental issues (e.g. attrition, new hires, learning hours, employee satisfaction etc.), but failing to guide business actions.

HR Analytics is not just about shiny new technology and tools, but more fundamentally, it should focus more on measuring business results and less on HR activities. For instance, we shouldn’t just report employee engagement survey results, but how it improves customer and financial outcomes. Or how learning hours are translating into better workforce capabilities that enable business success.

A clever hack to sharpen the thinking on analytics is to add the words “so that” to the HR area you are exploring. For instance, we want to analyze talent rotations so that we can understand whether mobility creates better business results and talent retention.

Explore this topic in detail here (also includes some great questions to assess if your HR Analytics efforts are in the right direction).

Working Better

Correlation and causation are deceptively similar. The human brain has a tendency to simplify incoming information and we fall in the trap of treating correlation and causation as the same. While both concepts can co-exist at the same time, correlation does not imply causation. Correlation simply means two things show a linked pattern, but causation implies one causes the other to happen. Dive in here to explore this fundamental topic in analytics.

Tiny Thought

“All models are wrong, but some are useful" ~ George Box