HR Analytics: Good or BAD

HR Analytics can gauge employee engagement and whether or not workers have the skills to reach company goals. HR representatives can now talk with business leaders, find out what they need and hire accordingly. HR Analytics allows Human Resources to interpret data, recognize trends or issues, and take proactive steps with different departments to keep the organization running smoothly and profitably. HR Analytics has pushed Human Resources into a more active and involved role in Organizations' planning and objectives. HR Analytics workforce metrics that can help companies glean information about their talent pool will transform Human Resources. 

All HR professionals have long been data collectors, amassing and keeping track of employees' personal information, salary rates and the annual number of retirements. But to grasp the potential of HR Analytics, HR managers need to become data interpreters. Adding to this, HR Analytics is an emerging discipline which has the capability of fulfilling a promise of becoming a great strategic partner. The most important aspect of HR Analytics is that HR professionals need to differentiate which measures matter for analysis.

What is stopping HR from unlocking the full potential of Analytics?

·         The data is too fragmented or dispersed – there is a tremendous amount of employee related data available, but it isn’t always consistent and may be in several different places, making it hard to get at or use.

·         HR is asking the wrong questions – the HR data that most organizations collect holds little value. To be effective in analytics, HR professionals must first form some hypotheses that are linked to business outcomes and worth exploring to create deeper business insights.

·         HR lacks the right skills – in many cases HR lacks the skills required to carry out the sort of complex statistical analysis required to unlock the power of HR analytics.

This is a true call to action. There has never been a better time to plan and implement a more advanced yet practical approach to collecting, analyzing and communicating the business insights that can be gleaned from the right HR data.

SWADHIN MISHRA
PGDM 2014-16