HR PLANNING

CRITIQUE PAPER:

A. WORKFORCE ANALYTICS

It is by the reporter that the role of workforce analytics in SWP Workforce analytics is one of the

most important components of SWP. It is essentially the ‘glue’ that holds the SWP process

together.

The way I understand, it provides a valuable, decision making, and productive information of a

company. To achieve business goals, the HR leaders must strap up technology and business

insights in which staff analytics plays a vital role. This data analysis tool gives the organization

workforce performance and improvement report, analyze staffing, recruitment, training,

development, and other benefits.

It does not mean buying expensive software, workforce analytics tools, setting up a huge team,

or lengthy processes. You can start small and have conversations with employees and record

their responses. The next step would be to add managers in the loop, involve various functions as

necessary, make a plan, and commit to it. Sharing the data is crucial, but you need to do it with

the right and relevant managers and HR professionals. Employee data is confidential and

sensitive and needs to be handled as such. Tools provide options where you can give access to a

select few people or limit what other managers see. Use the data to drive initiatives, remedy any

existing problems, and bring positive changes in the organization. HR Analytics will help any

organization monitor and improve their employee’s engagement, employee retention, employee

wellness, employee productivity, employee experience, and work culture.

Many workforce analytics efforts start as a consultancy project. A question is formulated “How

do our employees experience their journey?”, many people are interviewed, data is gathered, and

with the help of the external consultants a nice report is written and many follow up projects to

redesign the employee journey are defined. A one-time effort is nice, but it might be more

beneficial to develop ways to gather more regularly and maybe even real-time feedback from

candidates, employees and other relevant groups.

Currently, the general opinion seems to be that people analytics is a better label than HR

analytics.

HR analytics is overused. In the last few years, HR analytics has become a real buzzword. It is,

for example, hard to find a software provider that doesn’t sell an HR analytics tool. Providers of

HR dashboard and data visualization tools often claim to include people analytics functionalities,

even though 90-99% of these tools only focuses on key HR metrics and don’t include analytics

functionalities.

The term HR analytics is too narrow. The term HR analytics has a big disadvantage as implies to

be exclusive to Human Resources. The reality is, however, that proper analytics goes well

beyond HR, as they ideally also include financial and other data. In addition, the HR department

often lacks the skills to do analytics, which is why the analytics team also includes people with

experience in IT, finance, and data analytics. Indeed, it may be easier to build support for a

people analytics project than for an HR analytics project.

It’s all about people. Whether we are predicting employee agitation, looking at performance,

calculating an ROI or engaging in long-term workforce planning, we are all studying and
analyzing people. Indeed, oftentimes HR analytics dives into elements that are the manager’s

prime responsibility, and not HR’s.

In the past, companies often collected data on people solely to ensure they were meeting targets

and perhaps to reprimand them if they were off the mark. However, more and more companies

are waking up to the fact that people are the most important asset in any business, and when your

employees are happy, your whole organization performs better.

Collecting, analyzing, and gaining insight from employee data can have a transformative effect

on not only company performance, but the workforce as a whole.