Why all HR professionals must be conversant in HR analytics
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Why all HR professionals must be conversant in HR analytics
- People analytics
- Digital HR/HR technologies
- Change management
- Consulting and influencing
- Agile working
- Strategic workforce planning
- Ethics & data privacy
- Design thinking
- Stakeholder management
- Diversity & inclusion
- AI, robotics & future of work
- Employer branding
A glimpse of the HR future
There are analytics capabilities built into most new and upcoming software offerings, which have increased our ability to collect and analyse data. This data holds the promise to help HR analytics teams understand how they can improve the employee experience. Real-time sentiment and emotion recognition analysis is a fast-growing field, which is increasingly being used to measure how employees are feeling. There is technology to analyse a person’s facial nano expressions and gauge their emotions such as happiness, anger or sadness. It can also predict if the person is truthful or surprised. Similar technology for voice analysis is already available.Biosensors and wearables are widely available for personal health and fitness, providing data for physiological metrics (heart rate, sleep patterns, blood pressure, etc.), as well as various environmental metrics (distance, altitude, etc.). Similar devices are used in the workplace to help improve health & safety – for example, devices can be worn by truck drivers to alert them if they are falling asleep while driving. Other devices are being used in high-volume work settings to help improve productivity by alerting employees when they are not focused or when their stress levels are too high.
The handling of sensitive information on an employee’s health or feelings must be handled with extreme care.
However, future applications do not need to be so individualised. Improving any HR process is a good opportunity to apply a design-thinking mindset; get feedback from users, supervisors, vendors and other stakeholders; use the feedback to redesign the process; pilot the new approach; and collect data to see if it is better than the old process. Is it cheaper/faster/better and does it help to increase productivity/revenues/profits? Does it make the employee experience better?Many questions remain about this ability to track and use data. We need to overcome the lack of skills to analyse the data. Technology, and the resulting data, must be validated, especially when it comes to interpreting feelings and thoughts. The new technologies have access to sensitive areas, raising concerns about data storage and usage, and there may be some who want to hoard or misuse this data, which will lead to regulation at some point on how it can be used and interpreted. Personal data protection legislation is already in place in many jurisdictions and will likely continue to evolve rapidly as technologies become more powerful and available.
There will also be many HR professionals and employees who will resist change. The handling of sensitive information on an employee’s health or feelings must be handled with extreme care. The HR function will need to continuously monitor and update its policies and communicate these to employees – about what type of data is being collected, for what purpose, for how long, where it is stored, and the data protection mechanisms in place. Whatever the future holds, it is an exciting time to be an HR professional!
This article was first published in Human Resources and is reproduced with permission. Original can be found at https://www.humanresourcesonline.net/why-all-hr-professionals-must-be-conversant-in-hr-analytics
