People analytics

Our take on people analytics

As we have covered in our blog post about people science, it’s better to have a full picture of a challenge rather than one person’s gut feeling. People analytics is the way to solve that.

What we’re talking about is not one single business case where you’ve calculated a people cost. We’re talking about a continuous check in on your people through a wide number of data-points covering the full people spectra (or employee life cycle). It’s about finding KPI’s, metrics, data sources, connecting systems and start telling your HR-story. By making sure that you get your insights based on your full population and the correct target group rather than one single gate-keeper, you will get a large business value that hits the bottom line.

We’re talking about a continuous check in on your people through a wide number of data-points covering the full people spectra

There are a number of ways to tackle the challenge of building people analytics. You can simply buy HR-tech products, hire analysts or data scientists, teaming up with your business controller or do something completely different, there’s no right or wrong. What you have to decide long term though, is if you want to take a top-down or bottom-up approach to make your business data driven.

Top down means establishing a centre of expertise which, based on the available data, start looking for insights and feeding them to your HR management team. It makes sense to start investing in resources such as analysts or software from a point where your whole company gains from it. This can open up for really cool findings that can be shared with your management team.

However, what we strongly believe in is a bottom-up approach where you enable your full hr-org in their daily challenges. It’s the recruiter, HR generalist or HR manager that has the context and therefore they should draw the conclusions. By giving your team more leverage through training, self-service access to data and support in interpreting it, you suddenly not only get one single director or a management team that can be data-driven but a full department. That way, you can rely on that decisions and suggestions are be based on a solid foundation of data and insights.

How you build your team depends on the context though. You will need to understand where and how to start. For example, how you best build your team depends on how data-driven they are from the start. Long term you will also have clear wins by combining a high level of analytical competence among your employees with a centralised function that can do more advanced or overarching projects. Just remember, long term it doesn’t matter how skilled some of your employees are if you still have a too large proportion that prefers to use their gut feeling.