How Companies can Drive Effective Talent Development with People Analytics
Enhancing workforce productivity, training and incentivizing employees to do better, boosting resource utilization call it what you will, talent development is today undeniably a core human resources(HR) mandate.With various digital technologies fundamentally disrupting the nature of work across industries, and competition intensifying for a limited pool of high-quality talent, companies must constantly reskill and up skill their employees. This is crucial, considering that the millennial generation is increasingly not averse to switching jobs frequently in its quest for mobility, work satisfaction, flexibility and better work-life balance. HR, there fore, needs to reimagine the human capital management (HCM)life cycle, particularly the way it executes talent management initiatives to diversify employees’ competencies in line with dynamic business goals.Given this back drop, people analytics has come a long way in the last few years. A practice that initially began with a niche focus on employee engagement and retention is now increasingly becoming a critical business imperative across the wider enterprise. As HR continues to evolve into a data driven business function,people analytics has gone beyond leveraging data and digital tools to evaluate and track employee performance, and flag the same to the management. Chief human resources officers (CHROs) are now looking to embed data-backed people management approaches within the organization, in order to facilitate better business outcomes such as reduced customer churn, accelerated product innovation.
Drivers of growing people analytics adoption
There are three essential factors driving the growing adoption of people analytics, or HR analytics, in the enterprise landscape today. One, organizations are investing massively in initiatives to harness data across various stages of the HCM life cycle,including talent acquisition, performance management, compensation, workforce planning, talent management and retention. This trend is being underpinned by an unprecedented surge in the volume of relevant data being generated, coupled with a wide spread roll out of cloud based HR systems. Two, CHROs are facing increased demands to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) in a time-bound manner, as far as their different talent development programs are concerned. As a result, HR is embracing data analytics to showcase measurable outcomes achieved through its initiatives, instead of basing decisions on subjective judgment and gut instinct. Three, many HR departments are yet to effectively mine the massive volumes of employee data around multiple dimensions such as performance, career history, demographics, training and pay trends. However, with advanced, user friendly tools at their disposal now, CHROs have begun aggressively adopting people analytics for delivering on their core mandate.
Benefits of people analytics
In a world rapidly being reshaped by disruptive digital technologies,time remains
the biggest delimiter to realizing core business goals. This is where people analytics can play the role of a significant enabler in two ways by boosting efficiency and effectiveness. Let me elaborate.
First, digital enterprise analytics solutions, based on a data-oriented employee management approach, can deliver tangible efficiency gains across multiple functions by fostering enhanced, real-time business process management. This, in turn, can pave the way for optimized time to market, time to hire people, time to close customer issues, and so on. For example, you could improve your organization’s talent acquisition practices by using people analytics to define the qualifications for each job opening, and gauging applicants' potential performance pre recruitment to shortlist candidates accordingly.This would help you eliminate manual work flows for faster recruitment, boost the quality of hiring by averting unconscious biases, and correlate recruitment data to business outcomes such as top line growth.
Second, people analytics can enable senior executives across different functions to ideate and formulate appropriate strategies for increased effectiveness. By harnessing data-based insights to recalibrate the way it approaches talent development, management could ensure alignment between key business objectives and various hiring and skilling programs. As a case in point, people analytics can increase the ability of recruiters to identify the most suitable candidates by over 50 percent, according to research published in the Harvard Business Review.
Challenges
Despite the compelling case for rolling out people analytics across the organization, many CHROs and business executives are struggling to reap the desired benefits. An HBR survey of CxOs revealed that inaccurate, inconsistent, or hard-to-access data involving excessive manual manipulation remained the biggest impediment toward effective utilization of people analytics. Another major challenge lies in getting high-quality data for the subsequent analysis to be effective and relevant. For instance, if a CHRO wants to segment the organization’s overall talent pool into different buckets based on workers' experience, functional and leadership skill sets, then sourcing, consolidating and integrating relevant data sets becomes a headache. This impedes HR's ability to leverage based on people analytics for chalking out specific, targeted initiatives aimed at enhancing employees’skills.
In fact, the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2017 study finds only 8percent of the polled companies reporting they have usable people data. Moreover, a mere 9 percent of respondents proclaim to have a sound understanding of the talent dimensions that influence the performance of their staff, the report added.
Mitigating steps
In order to overcome these challenges, and successfully embed a data oriented HR culture through out your organization for next generation talent development, I recommend the three following steps:
First, define, map and track employee learning for increased staff productivity and skill enhancement. This will require you to shift from the conventional "push" mode of learning to a “pull” mode where individual employees customize their learning requirements and access relevant knowledge repositories. In conjunction, you should look at facilitating self-learning mechanisms, in line with changing business objectives. On both these fronts, people analytics can come in handy, by helping you mapping the learning aspirations of every worker, and chalking out an appropriate learning plan. Secondly, as your business objectives keep evolving, you need to continuously revisit your talent management practices, and also ensure the same are aligned with core organizational values. Keep in mind strategies will indeed change with time, but your company’s fundamental values will be sacrosanct. Analytics can help you in this regard by tracking deviations, if any, and implementing mitigating steps. Finally, you need to bring the various business stakeholders related to talent management across your organization, spanning different functions such as HR, corporate learning and IT, on the same page. Put simply, they all must share a unified vision of how to define, plan, execute and track different phases of the HCM life cycle, with a special emphasis on talent development. And, once the strategy is in place, you must make the requisite investments in people analytics on an ongoing basis, in terms of incorporating new functionalities and business processes.
HR will have to redefine its business purpose in the digital age, in terms of driving revenue growth, cost rationalization and employee satisfaction. Given this inescapable reality, organizations that can leverage people analytics for enhanced workforce productivity and streamlining of business processes will have a clear edge over their competitors.
First, digital enterprise analytics solutions, based on a data-oriented employee management approach, can deliver tangible efficiency gains across multiple functions by fostering enhanced, real-time business process management. This, in turn, can pave the way for optimized time to market, time to hire people, time to close customer issues, and so on. For example, you could improve your organization’s talent acquisition practices by using people analytics to define the qualifications for each job opening, and gauging applicants' potential performance pre recruitment to shortlist candidates accordingly.This would help you eliminate manual work flows for faster recruitment, boost the quality of hiring by averting unconscious biases, and correlate recruitment data to business outcomes such as top line growth.
Second, people analytics can enable senior executives across different functions to ideate and formulate appropriate strategies for increased effectiveness. By harnessing data-based insights to recalibrate the way it approaches talent development, management could ensure alignment between key business objectives and various hiring and skilling programs. As a case in point, people analytics can increase the ability of recruiters to identify the most suitable candidates by over 50 percent, according to research published in the Harvard Business Review.
Challenges
Despite the compelling case for rolling out people analytics across the organization, many CHROs and business executives are struggling to reap the desired benefits. An HBR survey of CxOs revealed that inaccurate, inconsistent, or hard-to-access data involving excessive manual manipulation remained the biggest impediment toward effective utilization of people analytics. Another major challenge lies in getting high-quality data for the subsequent analysis to be effective and relevant. For instance, if a CHRO wants to segment the organization’s overall talent pool into different buckets based on workers' experience, functional and leadership skill sets, then sourcing, consolidating and integrating relevant data sets becomes a headache. This impedes HR's ability to leverage based on people analytics for chalking out specific, targeted initiatives aimed at enhancing employees’skills.
In fact, the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2017 study finds only 8percent of the polled companies reporting they have usable people data. Moreover, a mere 9 percent of respondents proclaim to have a sound understanding of the talent dimensions that influence the performance of their staff, the report added.
Mitigating steps
In order to overcome these challenges, and successfully embed a data oriented HR culture through out your organization for next generation talent development, I recommend the three following steps:
First, define, map and track employee learning for increased staff productivity and skill enhancement. This will require you to shift from the conventional "push" mode of learning to a “pull” mode where individual employees customize their learning requirements and access relevant knowledge repositories. In conjunction, you should look at facilitating self-learning mechanisms, in line with changing business objectives. On both these fronts, people analytics can come in handy, by helping you mapping the learning aspirations of every worker, and chalking out an appropriate learning plan. Secondly, as your business objectives keep evolving, you need to continuously revisit your talent management practices, and also ensure the same are aligned with core organizational values. Keep in mind strategies will indeed change with time, but your company’s fundamental values will be sacrosanct. Analytics can help you in this regard by tracking deviations, if any, and implementing mitigating steps. Finally, you need to bring the various business stakeholders related to talent management across your organization, spanning different functions such as HR, corporate learning and IT, on the same page. Put simply, they all must share a unified vision of how to define, plan, execute and track different phases of the HCM life cycle, with a special emphasis on talent development. And, once the strategy is in place, you must make the requisite investments in people analytics on an ongoing basis, in terms of incorporating new functionalities and business processes.
HR will have to redefine its business purpose in the digital age, in terms of driving revenue growth, cost rationalization and employee satisfaction. Given this inescapable reality, organizations that can leverage people analytics for enhanced workforce productivity and streamlining of business processes will have a clear edge over their competitors.
