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HR Data in 2023 is proving to be a crucial tool across for business and workforce decision making, across the entire lifecycle of workers.
With organisations and the economy rebounding from COVID-19, many are forging a journey of better engaging their workers, boosting productivity, and aiming for steady growth. But in an economic environment that is tenuous (at best), coupled with the desire of most workers to work from home – or at least, hybrid – how are organisations coping?
The smart ones are coping with the use of HR data.
Being able to harness HR data in 2023, will be key to a successful year. There are so many moving parts to the economy and worker’s needs that by not taking insights from HR data this year, could well be fatal.
Where should you turn to to ensure your 2023 HR policies are in line with the market, your organisation’s strategic vision, the needs and wants of your workers, and the cultural nuances of your business?
As has been the case for some time, information is the answer (or more specifically, your ability to harness HR data). Quality HR data in 2023 will enable you to upgrade your HR policies, and should act as the unequivocal informant of all insightful HR and business leadership decisions.
To get you off on the right foot, we’ve provided the three major considerations for HR data management so you can gain a competitive advantage in 2023.
Early adopting HR leaders are already across these initiatives. Maybe it’s time you were too?
1 Your Data Sources: Getting it Right, Right Now!
The data points available to HR business leaders, both inside and outside an organisation, are seemingly infinite. Success will be found by tapping into the metrics that are most critical for performance improvement in your organisation.
Don’t worry about anyone else; just focus on the information that will help your performance improve.
Here are examples of key internal sources and metrics for you to harness HR data in 2023:
- Employee surveys
- Attendance records
- Revenue per employee
- Offer acceptance rate
- Voluntary turnover rate
- Involuntary turnover rate
- Salary and promotion history
- Employee work history
- Absenteeism
- Demographic data
- Personality/temperament data
- Training cost per employee
- Flight risk
- Time to fill open positions
- Recruitment process efficiency
- Employer brand value and impact
- The efficiency and recency of employee databases
- Exit interviews.
Here are some examples of external data sources to consider:
- Availability of key skills across the job families in your business
- Market compensation strategies
- Competitive employer brand performance
- Unemployment rate
- Underemployment rate
- Industry uptake of contingent workers and its effect on the business
- Economic data
- Social media value for hiring and engagement across the market
- Recruitment and hiring data from LinkedIn
- Job boards published data
- Global perspective on industry trends, hiring, skills availability.
The key to gaining value so you can optimally take advantage of HR data in 2023 is by aligning the data available to you, with your organisation’s strategic goals. It’s critical to focus only on the sources and categories of data that are right for your business now, as well as considering those you may need in the future.
For example, a tech company may want to improve collaboration across departments, so they can increase the number of innovative ideas built into their software. HR can initiate supporting solutions like shared workspaces, company events and collaborative tools to help achieve this goal.
To determine how successful these initiatives are, HR metrics and analytics can be used to examine correlations between the HR initiatives, the company’s strategic goals and its performance, within a given timeframe.
Once the data is gathered, HR analysts feed it into pre-determined models, algorithms and tools to gain valuable insights. These tools offer dashboards, visualisations and reports so the company can see if there are positive business outcomes from the HR initiatives. As a bonus, we’ve provided examples of these tools at the end of this post.
2 HR Data in 2023: Gaining Advantage through Optimised Processes
Establish robust processes (and process reviews) to ensure continuous improvement of the capture, review, analysis and application of your organisation’s HR data in 2023.
Below, we’ve outlined a basic quality process you can use as a starting point. Keep in mind, the process must be applied to all segments of the data you unearth, every time you undertake a data initiative. Executed with diligence and attention-to-detail, this process will become second nature for your HR team.
Our recommended starting process, provided below, will enable your business to use HR data in 2023 with greater efficiency and impact:
HR data in 2023
Here’s the checklist:
- Benchmark analysis
- Data-gathering
- Data-cleansing
- Data manipulation
- Analysis
- Extract and apply insights
- Create an action plan based on analysis (continuously test new ideas)
- Execute on plan
- Streamline process
3 Predictive Analytics: A Major Player for HR Data in 2023
Analytics enables companies to measure the effect of their people policies.
By applying complex statistical analytics, HR can predict the future of the workforce. This enables managers to measure the financial impact of human resource practices.
Predictive HR analytics is a technology that learns from existing people data and uses it to forecast future behaviour of teams, individuals, HR policies and processes. This means that predictions can be very specific.
Predictive HR metrics and analytics use techniques to create a formula, or algorithm, that best mimics the historical outcomes gleaned from HR data collection (or data mining). This algorithm then uses current data to predict outcomes in the future.
By applying predictive analysis to HR intel, HR business leaders are in prime position to become a strategic business partner, as they rely on proven, data-based predictive insights.
Practical applications of predictive analytics include:
- Forecasting the effect of people policies on wellbeing and happiness
- Estimating the bottom-line performance of HR policies
- Determining the likelihood of – and preventing – employee turnover
- Hiring success: for example, the questions interviewees get asked in Google’s hiring process are all fully automated, computer-generated and fine-tuned to find the best candidate
- Predicting revenue using engagement scores: understanding drivers of engagement and developing HR policies in line with these
- The effect of toxic employees in the workplace, including productivity loss and the likelihood of good employees quitting because of toxic people.
“Predictive analytics is increasingly important to talent acquisition, as sophisticated analytics teams begin to prioritise recruiting workflows, conduct workforce planning, evaluate different recruiting sources, assess quality of hire, and use pre-hire assessments. Companies that are not prioritising analytics do so at their own risk”.
BONUS: Key Tools Used to Harness HR Data in 2023
There are a number of industry-leading tools for your organisation to get the most from your HR data.
This article from Forbes covers seven of them. And this article is also worth a read – the ones we believe are worth reviewing include Tableau and CrunchR.
And Finally: The Power and Pitfalls of HR Data Collection
Firstly, let’s take a quick look at the benefits of HR metrics and analytics.
HR data in 2023 has the potential to shift from being an operational partner to a strategic centre of excellence. Organisations now realise that success is built on people, and HR analytics can lead the way from intangible theory-based decisions to real ROI impact, through data-informed decision-making. Here are some of the benefits of HR analytics when they’re successfully applied:
- Better hiring practices
- Improved retention of the right talent
- Task automation
- Process improvement
- Improved employee experience
- More productive workforce
- Improved workforce planning through informed talent development.
And on the downside?
The road to actionable HR intel is not always easy – there’s going to be challenges along the way to achieving the holy grail of HR insight. There will be doubters and roadblocks in the business. So it’s important to stay the course so you can reap the many rewards that will be at your disposal. Below are some of the pitfalls your organisation may encounter:
- Finding people with the right skill set to gather, manage and report on the data
- Data cleansing
- Data quality
- Having access to too much data: analysis paralysis
- Not knowing what data is most important, and when
- Data privacy and compliance
- Proving its worth to executive leadership
- Tying actions and insight to closely to ROI
- Identifying the best HR technologies to keep track of the data.
Knowing how to use the relevant data is vital, as is preparing for the future data needs of your business.
Constantly updating your systems and staying ahead of the trends will allow you to keep accessing invaluable data that can be harnessed for ongoing success.
Falling behind in the competitive world of analytics is like trying to drive a car with an empty tank. Without the right tools, you’ll struggle to add value to your business.
Are you interested in optimising the value of HR data in 2023?
Finally, please do contact us if you have any feedback or comments.
As one of the world’s leading providers of contingent worker management solutions, CXC is well-positioned to optimise all elements of your contingent workforce strategy.
With operations in more than 100 countries across five continents and decades of experience, we can assist with every aspect of your program.
If you’d like to discuss HR data in 2023, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
