Making Sense of All the Data
From recruitment to training data and from performance management to annual survey data, organizations are building a data foundation that can enable evidence-based human capital (HC) decision making.
However, simply building the technological infrastructure and dedicating resources to collect and maintain data doesn’t guarantee that an organization can leverage its data effectively and efficiently to answer its most pressing strategic questions. Even the most sophisticated data warehousing and analytics systems won’t tell an organization how best to:
- Formulate and align analytic strategy to its business questions
- Determine whether it has the right data to address these questions
- Deal with the almost inevitable “messiness” that occurs in real-world data sets
- Build reliable and accurate HC metrics
- Convey results to decision makers using clear and easily interpretable metrics
Technology is not enough. Data analytics expertise is also needed to interpret and, just as importantly, determine how best to convey results to organizational decision makers. Analyses are useless if decision makers do not see their value and potentially damaging if decision makers are basing interpretation of the “wrong” data.
HumRRO specializes in helping organizations understand how their “people data” and HC programs and services related to key individual and business outcomes. We have helped organizations use predictive analytics to identify, understand, and influence key drivers of employee engagement, satisfaction, performance, and retention using data that already existed internally or could be easily captured. The value of any analytics process begins with what an organization is able to put into it, from planning and staffing an analytics effort to the quality of the measures upon which it is based.
An Expert Perspective
HumRRO has helped organizations address critical HC analytic and measurement questions that hardware, software, and data alone cannot answer.
For example, our custom HR analytics consulting services have included:
- Examining links among HC initiatives/programs and key organizational outcomes (e.g., performance and customer satisfaction)
- Evaluating the quality of data from a diverse array of enterprise-level data warehouses to support large-scale HC analytic efforts
- Evaluating the quality of organizational HC metrics and functioning of their HC programs
- Identifying key drivers of employee turnover and retention
- Evaluating and optimizing nationwide applicant screening policies
- Building dynamic and adaptive structural models to pinpoint what drives employee engagement across geographic regions
- Creating custom, interactive analytic tools that extend the capabilities of existing software and provide clear, understandable output to help drive evidence-based business decisions
Graphical comparison of an agency’s survey results to the Federal government.
It is clear that developing quality “people” measures is a science. However, the misuse of HC data can be very misleading, even damaging for organizations without careful attention to (a) the accuracy of the available data, (b) its relevance for answering strategically important questions, and (c) methods for helping decision makers interpret it easily and appropriately.
HumRRO has the expertise to help organizations step through this process. We offer our clients direct access to nationally recognized, award-winning Ph.D.-level analytics specialists who have a history of producing practical innovations in this area. We provide a deep understanding of data and measures, strong analytic skills to plan and guide analyses, and strong communication skills to help organizations build their human capital analytics capabilities.
