While those that work at McDonalds might have to sweat over an Orwellian vision of the future where they’re replaced by burger-flipping robots, the HR practitioner’s future is a little less bleak. While big data and analytics are becoming critical to business success, they’re never going to replace the intuition and institutional knowledge that your HR department has. The real power lies in coupling said intuition with the power of big data.
If you took an HRBP for a large division of an organization and showed them 100 graphs representing different data points around their workforce, around 75% of the time, you’re telling them something they already know. The other 25%, however, is where one can make powerful discoveries, as long as the interpreter of the data is willing to be flexible, which is the core value we’ll talk about today.
By no coincidence, these are also my company’s four core values. However, for this blog series, I’ll be relating them to the practitioner side. I’ll also be looking back at past projects and how each core value came into play, both in not-so-successful and very successful ventures.
Flexibility
When we talk about flexibility, we’re talking about the ability to pivot when the results show something outside of what was expected. This is a critical skill for HR analytics practitioners to have for a couple of reasons:
- Credibility is king. There will be occasions where the data doesn’t validate the story you were hoping to tell. Move on and “accept defeat”, because there’s no quicker way to lose credibility than to tell one story while the data tells another.
- Analytics showing something unexpected is often a blessing in disguise. By being flexible and following the new path, you’ll often make unexpected discoveries. Discoveries that go against preconceived notions or intuition. These, more often than not, are the “game changers”.
A great example of this was a story I recently heard about a very large household-name company. They were concerned with the costs associated with overtime, and looking for ways to reduce the spend. They dug deep into payroll, HRIS, and other data to look at overtime spend and how it tied to every other workforce metric. Just about everything they looked at was “as expected”, except for one thing. When they looked at overtime vs. voluntary turnover, the data showed something very interesting. Employees who received no overtime had high turnover. Employees who worked large amounts of overtime had high turnover. But employees that received a few hours of overtime a week had significantly higher retention than the other two groups.
They ended up completely shifting the focus of the analytics study. What started as a venture to reduce overtime turned into a discovery that there was a “happy place” for overtime that led to employee retention. They used this data to put in new standards around hours and overtime, and reduced turnover by a very large percentage. The end result is that the company created millions upon millions of dollars in ROI via this turnover reduction.
By being flexible in their expectations and interpretation of the data, organizations allow the data to come to them and show them the path. Let the data come to you, and it will take you places.
There’s a great Bruce Lee quote that sums this up well, and I’ll leave you with that:
“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”