Five Steps to Getting Started with

Workforce Analytics
Read an industry report or blog post on hot HR trends and technologies today, and you are bound to see workforce analytics near the top. Analysts and commentators agree: workforce analytics has become a must have tool for HR and a key component of delivering business value. But how do you get started with this complex topic?
This paper outlines the five steps you can take to simplify and accelerate your journey to workforce analytics. By thinking through the first four steps, you can develop the requirements to support the fifth step: selecting the right workforce analytics solution for your organization.

DEFINE Questions

ACCESS Data

ANSWER Questions

SHARE Answers

SELECT SOLUTION

STEP : DEFINE THE QUESTIONS

The purpose of analytics is to improve decisions. If those decisions affect how well the business will perform, then the organization stands to increase its business value. It is therefore key to start with the end in mind.
As a first step, identify your business objectives (such as, improving the bottom line), and then clearly define the key questions you need the solution to answer to support those objectives (such as, how does compensation relate to performance, which of our top talent are at risk of leaving, and what are our most efficient and successful recruiting sources). When formulating these questions, look to more than just core workforce questions, and seek answers to more strategic questions that will improve business outcomes. This will help in your selection of a workplace analytics solution, streamline the implementation, and support your business case by demonstrating how investing in workforce analytics links with solving key business problems. Core workforce questions may include:
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Strategic workforce questions may include:

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How many people are there? How many people are needed? Are people leaving at a high or low rate?

Where does our top talent come from? How effectively does the recruiting process secure the right people? Do performance measures and rewards align to retain the right people? Is leadership capability increasing fast enough to meet business demand? Do people get moved or promoted often enough to build capacity and retain the right people? Who of our top talent is at risk of leaving, and why?

Is the capacity for work enough for the work required? What is the overall cost to hire, retain, or develop people? Is the total cost of the workforce increasing quickly or slowly? How well are avoidable costs, such as absences or labor relations issues, being controlled?
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STEP : ACCESS THE DATA

The second step involves the most common failure point for analytics implementations: accessing the data.
Data is typically:
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Located in multiple systems and formats Incomplete and constantly changing

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Inconsistent and of poor quality In need of transformations and restructuring

The traditional response to these problems is to create a data warehouse. Data warehouses allow for a single view across different sources of data, such as performance and compensation, and can show how the workforce has changed over time. However, data warehouse projects are notorious for being time consuming, complex, and costly. Creating a data warehouse involves IT and/or business intelligence experts, who work to standardize data definitions, correct data quality issues, build a data structure or schema, and load data by creating ETL (extraction, transformation, load) processes.

According to empirical studies, between 50 and 70 percent of data-warehousing projects fail primarily due to the complex and ever changing nature of data and the analytics requirements.

Fortunately, new techniques are available today that mean traditional, one-off data warehousing approaches can be avoided thanks to cloud and in-memory analysis technologies. This Big Data approach can reduce your time-to-value dramatically, as well as your solutions implementation and ongoing maintenance costs. Rather than a year or more of implementation time and expense, an out-of-the-box cloud solution utilizing in-memory technology can be deployed in as little as one month. This type of solution can unify and clean your data from multiple HR and business systems without the upfront costs associated with traditional data warehousing. This allows you to focus on identifying what data you need (based on the business questions you want to ask), and also accelerates deployment.

Data security is an important consideration. When choosing a cloud solution, look for solutions that have direct control over where your data will reside, and have documented policies and procedures in place for accessing and securing your data. Cloud vendors that have such policies audited and reviewed will have formal documentation in what is known as an SSAE 16 report.

STEP : ANSWER THE QUESTIONS

Once your data is in place, you can start answering your workforce questions. Depending on the solution you have selected, getting answers to questions will take you down one of two paths.
Traditional business intelligence tools take a bottom-up approach: you start with a blank sheet and create a report. You must be prepared to formulate calculations based on your specialized knowledge of the data, the business, human resources, and the business intelligence tool. In addition to being time consuming and requiring advanced knowledge and skills, this approach also has the challenge of inconsistency reports created by one person can differ dramatically from reports created by another. To solve these challenges, many organizations create a centralized team of dedicated resources to create and manage reports, which serves to increase total solution costs, while also creating further separation between the end users and the data. Next generation solutions support a top-down approach, in which topic areas, questions, and visualizations are pre-built and standardized based on HR best practices. You drill into a topic area (such as retention) and select the question you want to answer (such as, which employee characteristics are influencing resignations the most?). This is particularly helpful for non-expert users, such as HR business partners and business leaders, who want answers but do not have the technical skills of an analyst. Such self-service approaches to workforce analytics both save valuable time and costs associated with specialized teams, and empower users with the necessary insights.

Next generation solutions support a top-down approach, with pre-built topic areas, questions, and visualizations.

For more advanced analytics users, look for capabilities that let you explore pre-developed metrics in real time, segment the workforce, slice and dice the data, highlight outliers, and perform comparisons to get to specific nuggets of fact-based insight. These systems save considerable amounts of time by doing all of the data handling and calculations for you so that you can focus on analysis and exploring the answers from multiple angles. You no longer need to re-invent the wheel when you implement a workforce analytics solution. Cloud solutions that provide best practice analytics out-of-the-box streamline deployment, and also ensure your analytics capabilities grow over time, at no additional cost to you.

STEP : SHARE THE ANSWERS

With answers to critical questions about your workforce in-hand, the challenge becomes how to share the answers with your business leaders. HR has a unique responsibility: to enable the whole organization to make better workforce decisions. Whatever approach is taken towards workforce analytics, it must include the capacity to share timely, accurate answers to everyday business questions in a clear and compelling way.
Many workforce analytics programs fail to appreciate the complexities of the sharing step and provide limited reports or a one-dimensional view of the answers. As a best practice, leverage dashboards to provide an at-a-glance view of key performance indicators to business leaders. A good analytics solution will allow end users to interact with dashboards by applying different filters to the data, such as highlighting specific roles, high performers, or new hires. This supports better insights and decision-making. For presentation purposes, use visualizations (or visual representations) to tell the story behind the data presenting the insights and interpretation you have developed based on your analysis. Peoples brains are wired to quickly recognize the patterns and trends in visual answers. Rather than sharing rows of data points, look to leverage interactive visualizations in your dashboards and slideshows. However, be sure to use the right visualization the wrong visual representation of data can be as damaging or misleading as sharing incorrect data. Best in class solutions will associate the correct visuals with the relevant analytics for you, mitigating this risk.

Identify opportunities to eliminate manual reports. Many companies produce thousands of reports a year, a surprisingly high number of which are never read. Replace these antiquated reports with secure, accurate, automatic dashboards and slideshows shared online or via mobile devices.

Share insights via interactive dashboards

STEP : SELECT THE SOLUTION

It seems counter-intuitive: you need a workforce analytics solution in place to do the steps above. However, by thinking about the experience and outcomes you desire from workforce analytics, you can make a more informed decision about the solution to implement.
Here are some key checklist requirements to consider. Ensure your workforce analytics solution:
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Answers the questions that are key to your business, while also allowing for growth in the future. Leverages in-memory analytics, allowing you to fast track the benefits of a data warehouse without the costs and efficiently unify and analyze disparate data. Combines the rapid innovation of the Cloud with data security to deliver anytime, anywhere access to answers. Includes best-practice topic areas, questions, and visualizations, allowing you to drill down to quickly get the answers you need. Provides capabilities for analysts to explore pre-developed metrics in real time, slicing and dicing to get to key insights. Provides casual users, HR business partners, and executives with interactive visualizations, and pre-built questions to guide them through exploration of key workforce issues. Lets you streamline the delivery of dashboards and slideshows by sharing online at-a-glance views of key performance indicators with business leaders. Enables easy creation of slideshows to tell the story behind the data through interactive visualizations. Supports collaboration amongst analysts, HR business partners, and business leaders through secure sharing of workforce data.

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SUMMARY
Workforce analytics has become an essential HR capability. The demand from the business for timely and effective answers to the core and strategic workforce questions is continually increasing. Daunting as this may seem, a series of new innovations has made it possible for HR to deliver insightful answers to business questions far more quickly, cost effectively, and accurately than before accelerating HR on its journey towards playing an increasingly strategic role in organizations.

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