Workforce Analytics is a necessity today for HR to play a strategic role

Isn’t it strange that after all these years the HR-classroom-pet matrix ‘Blake and Mouton’ or that notorious ‘9 by 9’ grid remains unperturbed in a box? So many leaders have come and retired, so many CEOs and their biographies have come and gone but still, the two axes stay stubbornly, diagonally awry.

For the uninitiated, one axis is about ‘task orientation’ and this is where production-oriented, autocratic leaders can go on an extreme- bothering nothing or barely little about their employees as long as the task they want is done and dusted.

On the other axis, you would find their antonyms – ‘people oriented’ captains who care as much about the crew as they worry about the ship. These folks ensure that good work- late work notwithstanding, the employees should not be encumbered with overtime or a bad chair or a sloppy coffee when at work. This epitome of ‘generous and compassionate’ leadership can too go on an extreme here though.

That’s an outcome that some software systems and automated HR analytics probably tried to eschew at the onset. From payroll solutions to leave management to the very appraisal tracking, HCM modules got better every year in avoiding lenient leakages and in freezing task-orientation obsession into a technology cube.

The slippery Y axis can indeed be balanced with all the task-orientation a leader wants to adhere to on the X counterpart. The word is – Analytics and new HCM capabilities.

Every day organizations struggle to answer essential questions about their workforce.

How do you keep track of your employee performance? How do you link employee performance with your organization’s bottom lines? Are you allocating the right resource at the right place? Is your workforce differentiated workforce? How do you decide your training programs? Are your performance ratings of your employees linked with metrics?

Do you keep track of attritions? How do you link the hiring rate of your company with the revenue generated, is there a way to do this?

The right solution and layer of HR analytics can seamlessly sit on top of a strong HCM suite and answer all the above questions – letting you know how to attract and retain your talent, why to spend on a development graph, how to motivate someone who does not care for ESOPs and a lot more.

HR Analytics is not hyperbole, if you integrate and scale it out in a pragmatic manner. It can pull out real-time, actionable and most importantly- insightful pieces of information that will help your organization leverage its talent in just the right way.

A performance appraisal spreadsheet software can only help you in making a quarterly report card but how does it help you or your employees if you cannot grab the pulse of missing resources or skills at the right hour and troubleshoot the situation with a well-timed training capsule or mentorship. A recruitment tool is only another tick-in-the-box unless it can really help you with a top-of-the-tree, agile map of who is needed where and why and how soon.

Some of the key benefits that HR Analytics can bring to HR are as mentioned below:

• HR Analytics surely help in measuring the performance of the workforce in real time and thereby drive employee productivity and lower attrition.
• HR analytics with predictive insights and on-the-move mobile technologies support the talent-centric strategy for recruiting, retaining and developing the best talent.
• Talent Analytics can improve management decision making and eventually build trust of workforce and bring transparency. Predictive analytics can help in succession planning, budgeting basis models , which are function of business cycles.
• Data mining from your payroll solution will help to understand root cause of primary HR challenges like lower employee engagement and attrition
• Big data – helps in computing and rendering hundreds of valuable workforce and performance metrics including sophisticated analysis to support company goals, such as analyzing recruiting metrics against learning & development programs to calculate how quickly new hires can get up to speed, correlating recruitment metrics against performance management metrics to analyze any issues in both sub-systems.

Analyzing the workforce with good HR analytics and payroll solutions can provide useful insights, enabling HR to become a strategic business partner for your organization.