Workforce analytics: Using HRM practices, methods and analytics to realise business goals

Abstract

This study has showered light on the current scenario of HR analytics in the corporate world in India. Statistical analysis of the results and data captured point out that  today’s workforce is in fact fairly familiar with analytics pertaining to human resource department, however, only 60% of the organizations have implemented analytics in the human resource department. In these organizations that are using workforce analytics, over 77% of the employees agree that workforce analytics has a positive impact on their business performance. Furthermore, most of the organizations use basic HR reporting and descriptive analytics whereas only a fraction has ventured into predictive analytics which includes forecast and has an impact on future planning. It also reveals that the organization which do use HR analytics use it largely for talent management and employee attrition purposes. Finally, almost all of the employees whose organizations have workforce analytics agree that it includes a wide variety of tasks from basic HR reporting to HR driving business through the insights from analytics.

As we move further into the study we reveal a lot about the factors that impede organizations to deploy the use of workforce analytics. It points out that lack of skilled talent and software working knowledge is the major contributor to aversion towards the implementation of workforce analytics in an organization followed by capturing bad data at any of the sources that are used for collation of information for further analysis and finally non-compliance of employee data to be used in the functioning of workforce analytics. It also revealed that organizations that are data-driven, meaning that at least have a dedicated data analytics/data science department find it much easier to implement analytics in their human resource department. This can largely be contributed to the ease of talent available within the organization to start and deploy analytics vertical in human resource department and also to the fact that they have the technical know-how to make the analytics work.