Written by Nibha Varma – June 2021
I have been studying trends and analyzing people data as a Human Resources professional for over two years. What first sparked my interest was a vivid realization that every key business decision or marketing strategy uses data, so why should people strategy be any different. In this article, I wanted to share my personal journey with data and how it relates to the wonderful world of HR!
Being a report writer in a former role, I would identify basic data points that were used as part of quarterly reporting to the board. These data points would be used to communicate a simple story of general employee health – i.e. how many sick days were being used a year, the number of terminations (voluntary/involuntary) every quarter, etc. As I started to think about data that upper management or the board would really need in order to make key business decisions, my mind began to brainstorm more useful and accurate stories I could tell if I just asked the right questions and presented a more accurate picture.
When it comes to data, what excites me the most is cross-referencing data points. For example, in calculating how many sick days employees took, it was found that 3% of the workforce took less than 7 days of sick time in 2020. Company A determined that percentage is below their healthy threshold set up by the organization and was content in making no changes to their strategy. Company B decided to dig into that number a bit deeper and tried to identify if they can see trends. For instance:
- What roles/positions have the highest sick days: Which may signal employee burnout or employee disengagement requiring a look at job design.
- What teams have the highest sick days: Which may signal distress due to a manager or employee burnout requiring leadership coaching/workshops.
- Is there a trend of sick days that can be seen with tenure at the organization: Which may signal employee disengagement requiring focus groups.
Company B has an added benefit now as they search for “smoke signals” and prevent/resolve an issue before it really hurts the organization.
Finding these smoke signals usually requires identifying and tailoring your approach according to a company, culture and the current challenges they might be facing. Part of putting together your approach includes asking the right questions as seen by Company B above, but also identifying what data you have access to, what data is out scope and what data you need to start collecting (a really important side note: good data in EQUALS good data out (aka GIGO checks!). At the end, you’ll be able to answer those key questions that will help in creating a robust and powerful people strategy.
I’d like to switch my train of thought for just a moment and not just speak to the fact that you can tell your company the story they need to hear in order to make key business decisions – you can also forecast the future! An area that has been getting more and more attention is HR predictive analysis. Predictive data analysis is everywhere and is basically where ML models learn from existing data and use it to generate probabilities of individual behaviour. How would we use HR predictive analysis in our world? The possibilities are endless, but it comes back to the questions we are asking. One fascinating application is Hewlett-Packard (HP), a company that is a leader in the HR predictive analytics field. HP used data to detect and prevent turnover by using predictive models to generate “Flight Risk” scores. These scores allowed the company to identify the likelihood of employees leaving as they saw high turnover rates, specifically 20% in their sales division.
As you can see, the use of data in people strategy is endless and incredible. Jack Altman in the book People Strategy says, “When your work centers around human beings and human behaviour, there will always be some subjectivity involved. But without quantitative measures, decision-making processes can feel shaky and lack transparency.” My personal and humble experience is that data should be a part of the people strategy of every organization and the use of data should re-evaluated every few years at minimum – and why wouldn’t you, data is incredible!