I’ve come across a few recent posts on LinkedIn where people are asking “does HR have a fear of workforce analytics?” or “why is HR fearful of workforce planning?”. This question is important, but I’ve heard it asked for years now, if not a decade. A recent study shows that over 90% of CEOs want their HR department to leverage talent data into actionable analytics. So why isn’t it happening?
The standard canned answers I hear are that HR doesn’t want to do analytics, or they don’t understand the value in it. I call BS on this one. This may have been true a decade ago, but it’s largely a misconception now. The majority of HR leaders that I speak to understand the value of workforce analytics and workforce planning, and they absolutely have the appetite and desire for it. The issue isn’t fear or lack of understanding. The biggest roadblock I’ve seen is the “if we can’t do everything, we can’t do anything” mindset.
Too many times I’ve seen people get excited about workforce planning and analytics, only to back off once they realize they have data or time limitations that prevent them from doing super-advanced metrics. Their data isn’t perfect (hint: nobody’s is). The dreaded “we’re just not ready” comes, and the project is shelved indefinitely. Now I fully understand a hesitance to do analytics that won’t be accurate. Accuracy is the end-all be-all of analytics. Gotta have it. But just because you can’t do extremely advanced analytics doesn’t mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater and short yourself of all of the massive value that less sophisticated analytics can bring you. If you wait for your data to be ready (AKA perfect), you’re going to be waiting forever.
Here’s where we can learn from our marketing department. Marketing these days is doing some of the most sophisticated analytics of any corporate function. They can tell you down to the penny which lead sources, emails, campaigns, ads are generating revenue, at what rate, and who the prime target is. Staggering ROI is being realized. Beautiful dashboards, reports, and data are being generated.
But here’s the thing. 15 years ago, this is what marketing analytics looked like:
Who remembers these? The extremely gaudy and basic “this many people have visited my website”? This was “version 1” of marketing analytics. Understanding how many people visited your website. It’s a far cry from knowing how many people came from LinkedIn vs. Google vs. Email Campaigns, from what countries, and what browser they use. But it was something. The technology, data, and resources weren’t there to do the modern, hyper-advanced analytics that they do now. Sound familiar?
Now let’s imagine that most HR departments are roughly in this same stage. Many large organizations couldn’t even tell you their headcount, turnover by full-time vs. part-time employees, or diversity metrics. I’m currently working to help a 4,000 person media company build out a robust workforce planning and analytics practice. It’s a multi-year project, and ultimately they’ll have extremely advanced predictive workforce planning, tied to engagement surveys and applicant data. But today, their data isn’t ready for that. So we started with what they could do, given their resources and data. We delivered extremely simple reports to leadership across the business. The HR equivalent of the marketing hit counter shown above. Turnover and headcount reports. It’s nothing that we’re going to write a white paper or go on a speaking tour about. But it’s delivering ROI to their business.
With the project I mentioned, we’re moving towards a world-class advanced workforce planning practice. But they understood that it’s an iterative process and you have to start somewhere. We are doing work to get their data ready for the advanced forecasting. But in the meantime, they’re still getting tremendous value out of what they CAN do today. They understand that an inability to do hyper-sophisticated metrics doesn’t prevent them from getting value out of basic to moderately-sophisticated analytics.
So for HR leaders that want to do workforce planning or workforce analytics but are hesitant because they’re “not ready”, here’s what I’d say based off of seeing many successful HR analytics projects in my career: the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. Just because your resources or data isn’t quite ready to do highly advanced metrics doesn’t mean you can’t get tremendous value and ROI out of the analytics you CAN accomplish. Start there. Advance in iterations. Start with the “page hit counter” and make progress one step at a time. Understand where you want to go long-term, but don’t let those visions of the future stop you from doing what you can do today.
If a couple of people read this and it helps them get started, I’ll consider this a success. I love seeing organizations leverage their data to create a more powerful, engaged, and successful workforce. And perhaps equally as important, I’m tired of hearing people say “HR is fearful of analytics”. It’s just not true.