Making the HR department relevant to the CEO with analytics

The HR department is poised to be a force of change.

A real transformational management consultancy, and a winning centre of excellence to support organisational revolution from the 20th to the 21st century way of working and producing.

Industry 4.0: A new approach to building an organisation

Up until about five years ago, staying on top of the administration, compliance and regulatory issues competently was a great start. Then Industry 4.0 kicked in at speed.

Industry 4.0 is a sudden, explosive revolution in computing power. On an exponential path to cloud computing, supercomputing and vastly improved software and algorithmic advances.

Bringing radical disruption to entire industries, such as medical, transportation, travel, energy, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, publishing, education, government, and retail – even space travel.

The tsunami of information and data

The tsunami of information and data which digitisation has brought is altogether overwhelming, and a goldmine.

Consider this:

• Data drives change; the raw material that can be picked through, filtered and shaped to create a highly tailored employee experience.
• HR is the finder, keeper and curator of top talent and fundamental organisational transformation.
• HR ‘owns’ the data and insight of any company’s most expensive, volatile, unpredictable assets and yet – most indispensable and mission-critical.
• You are your business’s best chance of survival because you look after the people, their skills and experience, and hence the institutional knowledge that makes or breaks your business’ success every day.

New commercial tools and HR in the middle

In the last two years over 500 new HR software capabilities have come online within the functional HR remit alone.

Covering the entirety of the employee lifecycle; from recruitment to retirement and everything in between. However, solutions are often fragmented and address only one aspect of the employee lifecycle stream. But knitted together, can provide an incredible canvas of efficiency and utility.

Organisations of every type, size and shape encounter intense disruption from emerging market entrants. HR need to embrace change and transformation but does not always have the background nor historical remit to proceed.

60-70% of predictive power comes from combining data – not algorithm.

HR sit on a goldmine of insight and information. The organisation who can master this information, organise it to understand their markets, consumers and internal functionality best – wins.

HR for business outcomes

Shaping talent strategies linked to business outcomes, understanding workforce trends and developing great leaders are all part of the future of HR.

HR can now be on equal footing to marketing, finance and sales at the board meetings.

Talent insights are HR for business outcomes. Moving from ‘HR for HR sake’ projects, to providing strategic insights to the business:

• Influencing business performance.
• Managing hiring process with the future business needs in mind, not the previous cost review.
• Predicting attrition and understanding what will make high performers stay and further develop themselves and their teams.
• Gauging the key factors that affect an employee’s sense of engagement, thus impacting the health and success of the business.
• Identifying skills, knowledge and capabilities for current and future roles.
• Correlating compensation bands with functions and individuals performance and overall turnover.

To be able to command such conclusions and provide solutions to clearly identified problems is the need for analysis, through data analytics, to measure and improve every aspect of HR capability.

How do we make it happen?

Today there are many different tools, processes and methodologies available.

Early entrants in this fascinating field are now presenting data science tools for people just like us; all-in-one solutions that are easy to use, friendly to engage with, and will do the hard statistical analysis and infographic development we just can’t find the time to create.

One of those incredibly forward thinking tools sets is IBM Kenexa’s Talent Insights capability. Of course, there are others – but Talent Insights is a great learning opportunity for you to see how a single cloud-based software pulls together every aspect of your people analytics journey, end-to-end.

Need help with your HR analytics?

Get in touch with Elise Korolev for support: