Technology has made our lives infinitely more measurable as today we can capture everything we do and turn it into data to be analysed and assessed. Over the last few years, we've been seeing incredible advances in data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), and its impact in organizations.
As HR departments are now beginning to adopt people analytics as an increasingly integral part of their workforce planning and strategy, last week Intersections webinar, an Open4 initiative, was dedicated to People Analytics.
People analytics is a method of analysing workplace data that managers and executives use to make decisions about their workforce or employees.This process applies Maths, statistics and data modelling to workforce data to discover and predict patterns.
According to one of the guests of the webinar, Sara Gomes, AI Strategy Manager at Accenture AI, we can define people analytics as “using data to know employees more and better and with that, we can offer a hyper-personalized experience”.
Before this, organisations would make decisions based on instincts or intuition but now, it’s possible to dramatically improve the way organizations identify, attract, develop, and retain talent using quality data. In fact, being able to study past data and make predictions for what is to come is enabling organisations to make better, more informed decisions, provide smart recommendations, discover and keep track of problems and engage with individuals and enhance their experience in the workplace.
People data is more and more becoming part of how we gain insights to improve performance and productivity, but also the engagement and positive experience of work for people. Through analytics, your organisation can improve the effectiveness of talent acquisition, by replacing manual processes, that ultimately will reduce the time to hire a candidate and increasing quality of hire. In the end, this data can be correlated with business outcomes such as increased revenue to create strategic insights.
Not only does people analytics give HR insights into current employees, it can also pinpoint any areas of the business where there are skills gaps.This enables HR to be smarter in their hiring practices, as job adverts can be tailored to target candidates who have the skills and knowledge the company is missing.
At IKEA, this journey started 10 months ago and Cláudio Valente, Head of Human Resources of IKEA Portugal and one of guests of the Intersections talk, that took place last Thursday, is already seeing some results from using People Analytics. Since IKEA Portugal implemented People Analytics there was a reduction on interviews per candidate that secured 85% of success of the applicant.
In the beginning, there may be some issues implementing the change because many organisations don't have the literacy to understand the power of data. A Harvard Business Review survey found that the biggest obstacle in achieving better use of data was “inaccurate, inconsistent, or hard-to-access data requiring too much manual manipulation”.
Analytics hold the potential to transform People Management: from recruitment and workforce planning to performance management and employee engagement. Through People Analytics organisations are being enabled to manage people in a more effetive way and build future-proof strategies.
