Imagine you have a huge strategic imperative, let's call it Talent 2020. Analyzing the state of the current and historical workforce will form the fact base that will lead you to smart decisions about what the future should look like. Now, let's think about what you can pull from your HR systems. It will be capable of providing a lot of clever counting that tells you how many, but the insights you really need are the why, the how, and the where.

 

• How are men and women different - are they hired, promoted, leaving at the same pace and why are there differences?

• What are the characteristics of top performers and how can we hire or develop more like them?

• Why drives high engagement and how can we improve it?

• Who are the high performers at risk of leaving and how can we keep them happy?

• How do we determine the drivers of sales performance or client satisfaction from a talent perspective?

• Where are the bottlenecks in the organizational structure that we can address to improve productivity? 

 

Do you see your HR analytics producing answers to these questions? Probably not. The approach to answering the important questions requires a partnership of business, HR, and data interacting together. These problems have many moving parts that will require insights from a combination of data sources - performance, attitudes, engagement, networks, HR, customers, sales. 

 

A cookie-cutter report from an HRIS system built by a young company in California will not be able to answer the business issues to drive a Canadian company's success. Your culture and aspirations are different from any other company in the world. Your organization has developed its own unique formula of success. You need skilled humans from diverse backgrounds to ask the right questions, to investigate and explore the data, and then put the answers together to inform decisions to solve the challenges current business challenges. 

 

Let's take our HR and business colleagues on a journey. There are many ways to approach HR analytics - for those who are new to HR analytics, I build slowly, meeting immediate needs and increasing complexity as enthusiasm grows. I develop a different view of the data to squeeze out new insights and explore innovations to help do our jobs better, faster, smarter.  I patiently mentor senior and junior colleagues in the analytics mindset to ensure they understand what the data tells them. 

 

In Scotiabank's Culture & Inclusion COE, I developed insights from the global engagement survey to deliver the voice of more than 70,000 employees to senior executives.  One key finding completely changed the focus for action: I discovered that employee engagement is a complex ecosystem influenced by many factors – with performance enablement at the centre. When employees are able to do their jobs effectively, they are more engaged. While this may seem like a no-brainer, the focus had historically been on developing managers, believing that they drive engagement directly. And the analytics don't stop there - I have changed the way leaders consume insights on a variety of topics:

• Pulse, annual, and ad hoc surveys

• Inclusion Index

• HR dashboards

• Exit and onboarding surveys

• Leadership planning

• Workforce projections

• Regulatory and benchmark reporting

 

Within Thomson Reuters' global Talent & Development CoE, I developed insights for decision support for programs effecting 55,000 employees. I combined multiple sources of employee data to validate hypotheses and discover hidden insights on Talent, Learning, and Leadership topics: 

• Leadership development program impact

• Employee engagement surveys and benchmarking

• Attrition analysis

• Succession pipeline for executives

• Diversity progress over 4 years

• Manager effectiveness survey analysis

• 360 assessment analysis

• Learning program impact

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At McKinsey & Company, I conducted 210 employee survey studies to diagnose current state and make recommendations for recruiting, mentorship, culture change, innovation, employee engagement, growth, and team performance.