Fine Tuning Your Workforce with Analytics
Workforce analytics is part of the red-hot human capital management market. In the past three months, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com have all acquired HCM specialists. Enterprise Apps Today’s Ann All recently spoke with Dr. Carl C. Hoffmann, CEO of Human Capital Management and Performance and one of the three authors of “Calculating Success: How the New Workplace Analytics Will Revitalize Your Organization” (Harvard Business Press, 2012).
As Hoffman explained, the market for workforce analytics has strengthened both because executives are beginning to understand the need to use their workforce as a competitive advantage, and because technology now exists to quickly distribute and support acting on that knowledge. The availability of a distribution system is critical, he said.
“Workforce analytics can be used to define highly effective work groups — the division of labor and the capabilities and experiences that are required. But unless the managers have ready access to the information that describes the team configuration, the characteristics of successful team members, and access to an inventory of available and interested workers, that analysis is of little use,” he said. “Modern tools that help extract, validate and transform data into information and distribute that information to the managers when it is needed in a form that is easily understood are critical to reinforcing the demand for that analytical product.”
In the first of a two-part interview, below, Hoffmann discusses some common misconceptions about workforce analytics as well as challenges associated with starting a workforce analytics initiative. In part two, Hoffmann will discuss using workforce analytics to promote knowledge sharing, and he will share his six key steps for introducing workforce analytics to an organization.
You can read an excerpt from the book on sister site IT Business Edge. And Hoffman can be reached at [email protected] .
All: Are there still some common misconceptions about workforce analytics?
Hoffmann: There are many common misconceptions about what constitutes effective workforce analytics. Six of the major ones are:
1) Analytics is not a piece of software or a product you can buy off the shelf. Too often data warehouses, dashboards and scorecards are thought of as synonymous with workforce analytics. Those systems are important components in the process of turning data from source systems into information managers can use to achieve their objectives, but they don’t achieve results in isolation. Workforce analytics is the process of defining the content that is critical to decision making and then determining the best use of those support systems to make that information available.
2) Analytics is not a set of prepackaged metrics that you can buy, plug in and play. While there is a correct way to calculate turnover, what it means, whether it is problematic, how to use the information to better manage your business depends greatly on what you are trying to achieve with your workforce. Nordstrom would have a very different view of turnover than Walmart.
3) Analytics is not focused on human resource administrative operations. Analytics is focused on helping the CEO and managers understand what actions to take to better connect their workforce actions to their business goals.
4) Analytics is not just about building a talent supply chain or building a talent inventory. An organization can hire great people and yet fail by incurring out-of-line labor costs, by asking them to accomplish work that is poorly designed, or by frustrating them with poor management or inadequate rewards and tools. Workforce analytics needs to be broadly focused on the totality of the factors that enable success.
5) Analytics is not, as one critic called it, merely “a way to exploit people by scientifically raising the number of bushels the sharecroppers have to produce.” Workforce analytics is focused on understanding both sides of the employer and employee equation. When business goals and the needs of the workforce are aligned, everyone in the company benefits.
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