Why does HR have a data phobic reputation?

Our aim is to help you get people analytics into your business strategy.

In my experience HR departments are always data-rich, but many seem to be analysis poor. Many commentators have written on this topic, as illustrated by this Forbes article. HR seems to struggle to find a way to usefully manage the data inflow so that it can positively impact decision-making and activities. Being an expert on both internal factual people data and influential external human capital market data is, in my opinion, the only way to drive effective HR strategies.

A Fast Company article on the future of works states that:

People analytics offers enormous potential to organizations to drive business strategy, improve performance, and personalize and enhance the employee experience.

Changing the business strategy dynamic

It seems to me that HR is often ‘late to the party’ when it comes to company business strategies. Instead of being able to discuss and influence the human capital element of business strategy, HR becomes an ‘order taker’ for the business human capital demand. This sometimes means that HR professionals are faced with ambitious people demands from senior business leaders who have a poor understanding of the internal and external human capital market, and thus provide less than adequate personnel budgets for the strategy they wish to deliver.

To be fair, some of this is of our own making. If we had well-calculated and quantified strategic data that clearly illustrated the people investment cost of business strategy, we would be better equipped to challenge, influence and help define that approach. Good HR analytics help drive good business. A great short read on the how people analytics can help progress better HR management & business as a whole is this piece produced by AIHR.

Quality outputs come from carefully calibrated inputs

In addition, in HR we also sometimes go shopping for technical solutions when we have not fully calibrated the problems we are trying to solve. By this I mean we are suckers for the latest tools and techniques via, for example, AI, machine learning and other technology, when we sometimes do not fully understand the impact of what we do. This is excellently illustrated by the unconscious bias we sometimes build into systems like AI driven recruitment. See our own article for more thoughts on the subject.

The HUMDEX solution

So, instead of just being exasperated by these issues we thought we would try and help HR professionals by creating an algorithmically driven support tool that works with the businesses own people data to maximize its strategic business value. We couple this with a tailored external Human Capital market analysis, so that HR can produce well quantified internal and externally calibrated human capital evaluation that is a cornerstone of a strategic workforce planning. It demands senior management attention and input, plus both graphically and visually illustrates the workforce impacts of the strategic business decisions.

Humdex is here to help you:

K-now your internal talent gaps

U-nderstand the external talent market

D-efine a quantifiable SWFP & HR strategy

O-ptimize time & resources

S-ave money with data driven analysis

KUDOS -from Greek: Praise or acclaim for exceptional achievement-

Our aim is to help HR professionals both maximize their personal impact and the impact of their people data. We have worked for two and a half years on this a solution and are proud to be a finalist in the UNLEASH World Start up Tournament wildcard Battlefield in Paris this month!

You can find out more about the Paris UNLEASH conference & our start up zone here.

If you are attending come see us at Stand S25, near the "Investors Lounge", we would love to talk to you.

We are very proud that this is an HR solution developed by HR professionals for HR professionals – we want HR to be seen as the innovative discipline it really can and must be. We would love to work with our professional colleagues as innovators in business.

Want to find out more? Book a demo with us.

---

We work hard at keeping up to date and informed on the latest trends and news affecting the world of people analytics & strategic workforce planning. If you would like to know more about the work we do, then please contact us.

Author -Caroline Brent

Subscribe to our bi-monthly newsletter for more insights, news, light reads and trends from the team here.

Back

Diversity, equality, inclusion & the machine.

Can a diverse workforce be the answer to some of the rising challenges for businesses & is AI the silver bullet answer to achieving it?

As we hurtle towards the 2020s, change and uncertainty seem to be looming on almost every horizon. Automation and AI, the fourth Industrial revolution, climate change, and threats in cyberspace will all pose varied and complex challenges to businesses, and our responses will be crucial in determining both survival and success in this ‘brave new world’. How to prepare for these changes is the big question for all of us, including HR professionals. According to a recent article from Boston Consulting, it is diversity that may hold some of the keys for success in this new environment.

A range of voices & perspectives is better for business

Diversity and inclusivity have long been an important issue for HR teams and human capital experts. There are strong moral reasons for ensuring that our workforces fully reflect the diversity of our societies, and that our workplaces are spaces where anyone, whatever their background, feels welcome and valued. Yet diversity is also increasingly being recognised as essential to business performance too. As the team at Boston note, it will be the organisations that are equipped ‘with a range of voices and perspectives’ that will be best placed, not only to weather the coming storms, but to innovate, take risks, recover from set-backs, and ‘turn challenges into opportunities.’ There is strong evidence to support this. One study has suggested that organisations that have an inclusive culture generate 30 per cent more revenue per employee, and are eight times more likely to achieve positive business outcomes, whilst diversity can also increase innovation by up to a fifth, and foster a sense of trust.

Bias & the machine

Diversity can be a major organisational strength, and the fact that more leaders and businesses are recognising its importance is great news. But how do we transform our workplaces into diverse and inclusive spaces and ensure we get the undoubted benefits that diversity can bring? The big challenge that many organisations are now facing is what psychologists describe as ‘unconscious’ or ‘implicit’ bias. These are biases or discriminatory attitudes that exist below the surface, and can affect our decisions and actions even when we’re completely unaware of them. They are a major problem – even if leaders and managers are fully on-board with diversifying our organisations, we might still be working in ways that are exclusionary or harm diversity without even realising. Some have argued that Artificial Intelligence can be a ‘silver bullet’ here. What better way to bypass this inherently human problem than through a machine? But there is a growing weight of evidence that shows that AI carries the same unconscious biases as the people who program it. This is alarming news. As more and more businesses adopt AI in their hiring and other processes, we won’t eliminate such biases, but will instead risk embedding them within the way we work.

So what can be done? A recent article from the team at Deloitte has suggested a potential way of tackling this, borrowing from an approach called ‘design thinking’. This involves gathering data directly from people within the organisation – especially from those most likely to be affected by discrimination – to get insights on how different people experience the work environment and issues that affect them. Collaborative and creative techniques are then used to co-develop possible solutions alongside the workforce, which are then rigorously tested and evaluated. Human data analytics can provide crucial assistance here – with organisations using that data on inclusion experiences together with the profile of their workers to help identify where certain groups encounter problems – either getting stuck, or leaving the organisation altogether. This methodology ‘redesigns environments from the bottom up, starting with people’, rather than dictating our workplace cultures from the top-down.

A diverse workforce is more prepared for the future of work

Such an approach could help to create a genuinely inclusive working environment, one which fully utilises all of the different skills, ideas and perspectives that a diverse group of people bring to a company. It can be a radical step – shifting some of the power from the top to the other areas of our organisations, but as the evidence shows, the possible benefits of increased innovation, resilience, creativity and problem-solving are too great to ignore. It is a way of working that doesn’t just address the diversity challenge itself, but one that transforms that challenge into an opportunity – making diversity one of our biggest weapons to solve the problems of the coming decade. At a time when the importance of durable skills like imagination and adaptability seems greater than ever, centring the experiences and insights of your people to embed diversity and inclusion in the heart of your organisation might just provide the answers we need.

Author -David Selway

Sign up to our bi-monthly newsletter for more insights, news, light reads and trends from the team here.

Back