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Taking HR Analytics Beyond Technologists

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Dave Ulrich’s widely adopted model separates the roles in HR into four specializations (see Fig 1). The trouble here is that analytics has a strong part in all these roles, while it has historically been the domain of the Administrative expert, particular among those who run HR Information Systems/Services (HRIS). The technology is not easy to use, to say the least. But a new generation of companies began to see the opportunity here. At HR Tech Europe 2015, London, a gathering of HR practitioners, experts and organizations, I sat down with several companies that are moving the needle on how organizations can use data and analytics to advance workforce planning, recruiting and talent development.

In the Ulrich model, recruiting or staffing tends to fall into the role of the Change Agent responsible for organizational design and change management, with input from the Employee Advocate familiar with labor practices. Alternatively, it is also outsourced to agencies and recruitment firms worldwide to reduce the extensive time it takes to investigate and find talent in the market.

Talent acquisition

Depending on the level of formalism in the organization, a lot can go into the wording of job descriptions here. It starts with the hiring manager looking for specific skills and operational responsibilities of the candidate. Moves into the negotiation with HR where it fits in the performance and compensation plans, and with the hiring practices. Recruitment firms provide the added value of data on candidate availability to the given descriptions, in addition to their access to such candidates from their networks.

This point is where access to data on a market level becomes crucial. In a conversation with Meredith Amdur, CEO of Quebec City, Canada-based Wanted Analytics, with the right data companies can change their strategies not only for individual job descriptions but also bigger decisions like broader hiring, flight risk, or where to better place a new business office.

“Internal analytics doesn’t tell you enough. You need to see everything in the industry around them,” said Ms. Amdur. Their service crawls job boards, corporate sites and the Web to consolidate data to answer key questions: Given a job description, figure out how hard it is to fill this role, what is the supply, who is also hiring that role, which cities, what salary ranges, and what job roles. The software than gives a score of the difficulty to fill the role as extrapolated from their Big Data system.

For example, if you were searching for data scientists (Fig 2.) globally, you might first consider the Silicon Valley area because of candidate supply. But if you look wider, London has nine times as many and is easier to fill the positions on the hiring scale. Manchester would have fewer candidates but is much easier to hire. The availability of salary ranges depends on what is actually posted. These are based on actual openings and supply of candidates, not predictions.

Fig 2. A simple hunt for Data scientists (source: Wanted Analytics)

Wanted aims their services at large employers who tend to hire frequently and en masse. Using combinations, employers can manage hiring risk for different scenarios. This then moves from being simply about hiring to information strategic to the growth of the business. In the Ulrich model, such hiring scenarios can be profiled for the HR Business Partner to help business units make such decisions. Vertically on the people axis, it also describes to the Employee advocates how to anticipate skills and career development demand.

Organizational Design

Employees rarely stay within the same role for long in mid-size and large organizations. For both the vitality of employees as well as the needs of the business, redesigning the structure of the organization becomes a pressing challenging issue. Workforce planning under the HR Change Agent working in concert with the strategic goals of the HR Business Partner requires designing new scenarios of the structure.

Most organizations are still in the hierarchical models and redesigns (“re-orgs”) are still centralized, and stressful to all those involved, especially when the reality sets in. The org chart on paper doesn’t always reflect the reality of how people work together. Half the challenge is just understanding and reflecting that reality to better support planning.

London-based Concentra strongly supports data-driven organizational design that addresses this challenge in determining the actual state. Their OrgVue software makes this modeling of the organizational structure simpler to envision. It brings data from multiple HR records systems into a single schema-less model that can then be analyzed and scenarios planned. You can visualize the structure in a dozen different diagrams (tree, bubble, sunburst, bar and other charts) to highlight different aspects of the reporting chain.

According the Will Sheldon of Concentra, the software is mostly aimed at workforce planners rather open to everyone in the organization—although they can use feedback loops from the tiers of management to tune the system. As mentioned, this is best for modeling traditionally structured hierarchies.

Getting to Strategic Questions

The big questions of workforce planning tend to be the “What if?” ones. What would the budget be if your company increased the ratio of contract or contingent workers? What would the costs be if you were to relocate a division to a new city? What if the business strategy required more Data scientists and fewer go-to-market staff?

This kind of budget scenario planning should be predictive and needs real data from your company performance to provide real answers. This is where Visier’s software succeeds. Their platform integrates analytics of the existing workforce with the collaborative scenario planning. What Vancouver, Canada based Visier did is to think of all the big questions that workforce planners are interested in, and made it easier to create models of their organization to explore possible answers.

Such work tends to be a complex effort requiring managers from across many levels of the organization to participate. Likewise, the software can partitioning the broad scenarios into subsets so that managers only work with the area they are authorized to see, together with audit trails and separate approval chains for each subset.

Engaging Change

Beyond planning comes the actual transformation activities of coaching, and convincing employees towards a new direction. The best approaches are simple, frequent, and move in small increments rather than big wholesale changes.

After Enterprise 2.0 Summit, Paris in February, I spoke to Lara Pawlicz of 2Spark, a Paris-based venture focused on supporting change management programs with simple direct feedback from employees. Their system works through a steady progression of very simple questions to simultaneously teach and gauge how familiar employees are with a new change initiative.

They base their approach on Maslow’s four stages of learning from moving from unaware and inexperience, to becoming aware, then proficient, and finally internalizing that awareness so they “know without knowing.”

Essentially, by polling the participants with one or two simple questions everyday, it both suggests an idea of what they need to know and also gathers information on where they are. The simplicity of the questions makes it a quick step, but the daily periodicity makes the idea stick, until they eventually recognize it easily, and learned something without realizing so.

Whose job is it?

Coming back to Ulrich’s model, as you can see analytics is becoming a regular aspect of all of the roles (HR Business Partner, Change Agent, Employee Advocate, and Administrative expert). What we once viewed as a technological skill is now becoming part of each of these jobs. The tasks are still specialized although even these examples show that the skills can span multiple roles. Folks in HR: you don’t all have to become Data Scientists to understand how to do analytics because vendors such as these have made that aspect much simpler by guiding users with appropriate questions and actions that HR people would ask or take.