4 Steps to Develop Data-Driven HR and People Teams
70% of HR executives say that HR is ripe for reinvention, according to Gartner’s recent research ‘Accelerating the journey to HR 3.0’. HR is evolving into a more data-driven, digital function, driven not by intuition, but by evidence and actionable insights from AI and internal/ external data. Forward-thinking HR professionals understand the subsequent need to upskill.
Trends like automation and AI in HR might lead you to believe that the future of HR requires HR professionals to become technical above all else. But this isn’t the case. Research from myHRfuture in 2019 looking at the HR skills of the future showcased that the most in demand skills amongst HR professionals are not just technical skills, like people analytics and strategic workforce planning. Skills to manage relationships with key stakeholders, influence change and build credibility are also critical for data-driven HR. This year, Insight222 published research looking at how roles are developing within the people analytics function. The fastest growing roles are data scientist and business consultant – once again showing that even within the HR analytics function itself, it’s not all about technical roles.
We’ve looked back on the most popular skills that HR professionals have been learning in myHRfuture in 2020. The same pattern is emerging, that it’s not just technical skills that HR is focused on, but consulting and influencing skills as well. We’ve grouped the most in demand training into four themes. As talent executives plan to double their efforts in the next two years to upskill their HR teams in new capabilities, let this list be a guide to what’s trending in HR upskilling:
1. Building a solid foundation in People Analytics
As an individual HR practitioner, it is increasingly important to be able to accurately interpret people data and make recommendations or take actions based on this insight. When taking on a challenge your organisation is trying to solve, for example a high attrition rate, statistics can help HR professionals to understand and validate what’s going on from a people perspective. Statistical analyses can form the basis of an evidence-based recommendation (not just relying on gut feel), which can be made to business stakeholders. This approach helps to position HR as a data-driven strategic partner for the business.
The first port of call for any HR professional is building basic statistics and data analysis skills. Our course, Understanding and Applying Statistics in HR is one of the most popular for this very reason.
From an organisational perspective, the people analytics function needs to build a robust foundation, including strong governance, effective prioritisation of business challenges and delivering tangible business outcomes. One way to consider the elements you need for a successful people analytics team is with Insight222’s Nine Dimensions for Excellence in People Analytics® model:
2. How to have effective conversations with the business
The first step to successful data-driven HR comes before any number crunching and analysis is done at all. Instead of launching straight in with a “hot topic” or something that you personally, or the HR function more broadly, might think is interesting, it’s critical to start with a burning business challenge. Uncovering these challenges depends on effective conversations with the business.
Understanding business needs requires excellent communication and relationships with business stakeholders and is often a task undertaken by the HRBP. The next step is to translate findings from these conversations into hypotheses for your people analytics function to tackle. The popular course, Framing Business Questions and Developing Hypotheses for People Analytics, teaches you:
How to make sure that your People Analytics project adds value
How to get to the heart of the problem the business is trying to solve, before starting your analysis
How to understand and translate those problems into a clear hypothesis
How to ensure that the analysis you do is business relevant and has the right context
How to prepare to conduct the analysis yourself, or hand it over to the People Analytics team
One common concern HR professionals are often faced with is how to prioritise your people analytics projects or challenges. Once you have compiled a list of burning business challenges, a great way to prioritise is by business impact and complexity as follows:
3. Storytelling with data
Once analysis – based on a burning business challenge - has been undertaken, the next step is to communicate insights with the business. Stakeholders have to be taken on a journey from the original challenge, through the analysis to the key takeaways they should pay attention to in order to take the most appropriate action. If you don’t know how to visualise your findings and insights effectively, you will lose your stakeholders’ interest.
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, CEO of storytelling with data, was a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast and said:
“If you cannot tell a story with that data you are not going to be able to get the action that you need. I think there is a tendency, particularly for highly technical folks or folks who come up from a technical background, to want to just put all the data out there. Because we are assuming our audience knows the context well enough that they can figure out what is important.
Anytime we are working with data, we are working on our project, we make a graph, we know exactly what that graph means because we are the ones who made it, but it means we actually have a lot of tacit knowledge in our heads that we have to put out there for others to be able to use.
So, we can do things like use colour sparingly to direct our audience's attention to where we want them to look, put words around our data, not only to make it clear what our audience is looking at but what do we want them to take away from it.”
Our course, How to Use Storytelling for People Analytics, helps you to understand how to take your analysis and insights and turn them into compelling stories that will ensure that your stakeholders take action on your insights and recommendations.
There’s also a great module in our Analysing and Interpreting HR Dashboard Data training course on data visualisation for insights and recommendations, which will help you develop these skills.
4. Ensuring you’re creating value with your people analytics projects
One of the most interesting findings from this year’s flagship report, Delivering Value at Scale: A New Operating Model for People Analytics, was the clear business value that people analytics is now delivering. We surveyed 60 People Analytics leaders and asked the question, ‘what are the top three areas where people analytics adds value?’ Instead of performing people analytics for HR’s sake alone, insights from this work are delivering tangible outcomes against business challenges, like crisis management, diversity and inclusion and strategic workforce planning:
It should come as no surprise that HR professionals are keen to upskill in order to ensure that the work they do delivers business value. Our course, An Introduction to People Analytics, covers the business value of the practice.
As the HR function continue to evolve, both technical and non-technical skills will be critical for HR professionals to master in order to stay relevant. In a thought-provoking report, ‘21 HR Jobs of the Future’, 21 jobs for HR professionals that will emerge over the next ten years are organised on a low-tech to high-tech scale, further showcasing why both sets of skills are crucial.
Are you building the HR skills you need for 2021?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline Styr is the Research Director at Insight222. She is a thought-leader, researcher and writer on people analytics and the future of HR. Prior to joining Insight222, she worked at the Center for the Future of Work where she was an advisor and in-demand speaker on topics related to the future of work. She has also held roles in digital services and transformation consulting at Cognizant. Contact Caroline at caroline.styr@insight222.com