Ultimately, the success of a workforce analytics solution depends upon how well HR professionals are able to share and collaborate on their findings with other key stakeholders across the organization. Being able to easily and effectively share workforce data, and empower business leaders with the right analytics to make better, more well-informed business decisions, is the ultimate goal. Business leaders and executives need to be equipped with the right workforce data, in order to take action and improve the organization’s bottom line.
Ultimately, the success of a workforce analytics solution depends upon how well HR professionals are able to share and collaborate on their findings with other key stakeholders across the organization. Being able to easily and effectively share workforce data, and empower business leaders with the right analytics to make better, more well-informed business decisions, is the ultimate goal. Business leaders and executives need to be equipped with the right workforce data, in order to take action and improve the organization’s bottom line. The ineffective sharing of analytics means that even the most powerful analytical insights will never reach the right decision-makers in an actionable way. Remember, workforce analytics must be put to good use in order to make an impact and improve business outcomes in a positive way. HR must select a workforce analytics solution that embodies the four critical elements to successful sharing:
1. Standardized HR Dashboards...Read blog post here
2. Publishing Core Reports. The workforce analytics solution HR professionals select should facilitate the ongoing creation and delivery of formatted content that is consumed by various stakeholders and user audiences. While best practices dictate that an HR dashboard should stay relatively unchanged until goals are met, reports may vary from a one-time creation to standardized templates that rarely change from year to year. For example, reporting on a specific initiative or challenge faced by the organization may be something performed only once, while a quarterly business review report may follow the same template for consecutive years. Traditional solutions focus on analysts creating content for others, but the reality is that business users may also be report creators or editors. HR business partners will create reports for business leaders, business leaders will edit reports shared with executives and many other such scenarios make the need for easy creation, collaboration and sharing of reports critical.
A solution that provides the greatest opportunity for successfully publishing an organization’s fundamental HR reports will:
• Make it easy to “tell the story” of workforce data. Beyond formatting data, compelling reports share the insights found by representing the story, or step-by-step insights of the data.
• Allow business users to easily create and manage the various reports including the ability to update, refresh data and distribute them to stakeholders and collaborators.
• Provide sufficient detail and interactivity to audiences so they can answer follow-on questions themselves.
Reports are often the workhorse of analytics and provide for a broad set of uses within the organization. Fundamental to success is ensuring that reports are not something that only analysts create, but instead, reporting solutions should allow for business users to create and collaborate in the creation of reports.
We will outline best practices #3 & 4 in coming blog posts, so stay tuned!
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FOUR KEY RECOMMENDATIONS to help achieve organizational support and a successful workforce analytics solution that will create lasting impact—
Focus on improved business outcomes. Business improvements are the real value of analytics, which result from improved insights leading to better decisions that are implemented as changes in the organization or processes.
Focus on how analytics will be used and shared. This requires HR professionals to take into consideration more than the mechanics of data gathering, the defining of metrics and the building of reports. HR professionals must plan for how people will share and collaborate on information.
Use workforce analytics to make the HR function the leader in asking probing and important questions. HR departments that become mired in answering tactical questions never become strategic partners.
Deliver on four elements critical to sharing and collaboration. The four elements—standardized HR dashboards, publishing core reports, self-service analytic support and mobility—are essential to serving organizational business leaders, executives and decision-makers in truly valuable ways.
