Knowledge is power – Workforce analytics
Traditionally, HR has been viewed as the transactional part of an organisation that hires, pays, and handles benefits to keep the organisation running efficiently from a people perspective. However, over the past decade, companies are realising that HR can and should play a strategic role in helping organisations to understand the people and skills they need to be successful. This closer relationship with the board and the most senior leaders within a business has enhanced the need for more in depth information. This data is critical to more effective decision making related to areas such as workforce planning and recruitment, development programs and deploying critical talent.
One key to successful talent management is understanding one’s workforce, which is embodied by organisations in workforce analytics. Workforce analytics involves using statistical models that integrate internal and external data to predict future workforce and talent-related behaviour and events. These models help companies focus limited resources on critical talent decisions.
Historically, HR has thought about analytics more in measuring itself than in helping to further the business. Metrics focused on areas such as Recruiting’s Time to Fill or a simple Rate of Turnover for an organisation. Recently these analytics have matured. IT and HR have started working together to combine systems to provide business and financial analytics with an HR lens. Suddenly organisations are interested in things like Quality of Hire, which ties Recruiting efforts to business productivity and success.
For many organizations, finance metrics are part of the equation as well, as HR looks at things like sales per employee, revenues per employee and productivity, but is also looking at it by the HR demographics: How long people have been with the organisation? What type of training they have received? What is their hire source? What is their employment history?
Tying all this data together can help HR build powerful hiring and training programs to outpace the competition in finding talent, training talent, and ultimately keeping the right talent.
Doug Rippey
Global Practice Leader, Workforce Planning
doug.rippey@futurestep.com