Month: June 2016

8 HR Analytics : Every Manager Should Know

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The 8 HR Analytics Every Manager Should Know About
By Bernard Marr ,

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It goes without saying that people are vital to the success of any company. There’s no doubt that any business which can attract the right competencies, manage talent effectively, utilize capacity efficiently, and retain employees is setting itself up for long-term success.

HR departments are generating more data than ever before but at the same time they often struggle to turn their data into valuable insights. Based on the work I do with companies all over the globe I have identified some of the most important analytics managers can use to better understated the people-related side of their business. This post builds on my article on the key business analytics tools, which might make good additional background reading. Here is my list of HR analytics every manager should know about:

1.Capability analytics

The success of your business depends on the level of expertise and skill of your workforce. Capability analytics is a talent management process that allows you to identify the capabilities or core competencies you want and need in your business. Once you know what those capabilities are you can compare them to the capabilities you have in place at the moment to see if you have any gaps.

Tip: Capabilities are not just about qualifications and skills; they can also include capabilities that may not be formally recognized, such as the ability to develop and maintain relationships.

2.Competency acquisition analytics

Talent matters, and the acquisition and management of talent is often a critical factor in business growth. Competency acquisition analytics is the process of assessing how well or otherwise your business acquires the desired competencies. You need to start by identifying the core competencies your business requires now and in the future. Then assess the current levels of these competencies within your business and identify any gaps. You can then monitor how effective you are at developing these competencies in-house or spotting and recruiting candidates with those competencies.

Tip: Key to effective competency acquisition analytics is focusing on a small set of core competencies.

3.Capacity analytics

Capacity affects revenue. Capacity analytics seeks to establish how operationally efficient people are in a business, e.g. are people spending too much time on admin and not enough on more profitable work, or are individuals stretched far too thin? It also allows businesses to establish of how much capacity they have to grow?

Tip: The tricky part is establishing a system to track capacity without creating huge administrative burdens and without alienating employees with a ‘big-brother’ approach. Big data and sensor system can be very effective here.

The best people and HR analytics (Source: Shutterstock)
The best people and HR analytics (Source: Shutterstock)

4.Employee churn analytics

Hiring employees, training them and then integrating them into the business costs time and money. Employee churn analytics is the process of assessing your staff turnover rates in an attempt to predict the future and reduce employee churn. Historical employee churn can be identified through traditional KPIs such as the employee satisfaction index, employee engagement level and staff advocacy score. Surveys and exit interviews are also useful tools.

Tip: Always remember that some employee churn can be desirable. It is important to identify a healthy level of churn and develop system to pinpoint the ‘regrettable’ churn.

5.Corporate culture analytics

Culture is notoriously difficult to pin point and even harder to change. It is essentially the collective (often unspoken) rules, systems and patterns of behavior that embody your business. Corporate culture analytics is therefore the process of assessing and understanding more about your corporate culture or the different cultures that exists across your organization. This then allows you to track changes in culture you would like to make, understand how the culture is changing, create early warning systems to detect toxic cultures in their development and ensure you are recruiting people that don’t clash with the corporate culture.

Tip: One way to assess culture is through the analysis of customer service conversations, which can provide a rich vein of data to assess corporate culture.

6.Recruitment channel analytics

Employees represent the greatest cost and greatest opportunity in most businesses. Recruitment channel analytics is the process of working out where your best employees come from and what recruitment channels are most effective. Recruitment channel analytics will involve some historical assessment of employee value using KPIS such as human capital value added and return per employee. Surveys and entry interviews are also useful sources of data.

Tip: Aggregator sites like glassdoor.com operate like Trip Advisor for recruitment and can provide companies with independent reviews of their recruitment process.

7.Leadership analytics

Poor leadership, whether of a business, division or team costs money and prevents a business from fulfilling its potential. Leadership analytics unpacks the various dimensions of leadership performance via data to uncover the good, the bad and the ugly. Data about leadership performance can be gained through the use of surveys, focus groups, employee interviews or ethnography.

Tip: It is advisable to make the data collection anonymous, so that employees can really open up and provide useful information. Few employees would feel confident or safe talking about their leader or manager if they knew that person could or may have access to their opinion.

8.Employee performance analytics

Your business needs capable high-performing employees to survive and thrive. Employee performance analytics seeks to assess individual employee performance. The resulting insights can identify who is performing well and who may need some additional training or support in order to raise their game. Today, we have many innovative ways of collecting and analyzing performance, from crowdsourced performance assessments to big data analytics.

Tip: I advise companies to move away from the classic and outdated performance reviews. With modern data capture techniques it is possible to analyze performance more holistically and less focused on specific parts of a job that might cause employees to skew their behavior.

HR Word: Charismatic Authority

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Charismatic Authority definition

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Charismatic authority is one of the classifications of authority that make up sociologist Max Weber’s tripartite classification of authority, alongsidetraditional authority and rational-legal authority.

Charismatic authority was defined by Weber as: “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.”

The personal qualities of the individual are central to the concept of charismatic authority and it is the individual’s real or perceived elevation above ‘normal’ people that fuels other peoples’ acceptance of their authority. Some commentators suggest that narcissism  is a core trait in charismatic leaders.

Charismatic authority is an interesting case because its success is not reliant on external formal structures or norms, as is the case with the other two forms of authority. Because of this, power structures that rely on charismatic leaders to succeed may dissolve should the leader die or leave. Because of this, succession planning is key and there needs to be a process to ‘transfer’ perceptions of charisma from one person to another for the incoming leader’s charisma to be accepted.

HR Word :Change Management

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Change Management definition

Change management is an overarching, guided process to transition individuals, teams or organisations from state to another. The ultimate goal of change management is to achieve the desired change with the maximum of positive benefits and efficiencies and a minimum of negative effects on all stakeholders.

For the HR function, change management is a crucial aspect of their job as change management often focuses on the ‘individual’ level i.e. what effect will this change have on our employees? External factors, such as accelerated advances in technology and globalisation, are forcing organisations to adapt quicker than ever before, driving demand for effective change management.

Change management is often discussed alongside organisational change, which is gradual improvement of existing procedures, functions and processes.

HR Word : Catfish Effect

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Catfish Effect definition

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The catfish effect refers to the motivating effects of strong competition on weaker individuals. It’s named after a story, perhaps apocryphal, regarding the transport of live sardines in Norway. Transporting live sardines is very difficult but one Captain discovered a method; he kept a catfish in the same tank to keep the sardines active to avoid potential confrontations.

Organisations may take steps to ensure a level a competition in the workplace, such as sales leader boards, to make beneficial use of the catfish effect to encourage productivity across all employees. Gamification in the workplace, an increasingly popular method of encouraging productivity, exploits the catfish effect.

HR Word : Undue Hardships

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HR word of the day –  Undue Hardships

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Undue hardships are defined as any undue or unforeseen conditions which may prevail in an organization or workplace which are not at all beneficial to the employer, employee as well as the organization as a whole. It imposes a difficulty or a difficult situation for the employer wherein they need to accommodate people especially those with some sort of qualified disability. Sometimes accommodating such people may get prolonged and the organization may have to bear all the losses be it financial or humanitarian.

All these hardships are based on the nature, size, nature of employment and resources and are measured based on the nature and the cost that the company will have to incur because of this. While dealing with undue hardships we take into consideration the case leading to the current scenario. Usually these hardships are observed while making some sort of accommodation, if the condition or the cost of accommodation is such that it’s causing any sort of undue hardship to the organization or the employer the person with the disability should be given the option of paying up for that cost.

If the employer or the company can accommodate the person easily and it doesn’t hamper on the effectiveness and efficiency of the company it’s not considered to be a hardship but if condition arises such that the company is incurring any kind of losses because of that under such conditions the person should be given the option of either paying off or catering on his own as his presence will lead to undue hardships for the enterprise. Also, while accommodating a person three things should be kept in mind, they are : cost, health and safety requirements as well as any source of external funding that the organization is getting, other than these morale of other employees, inconvenience to business, collective agreements etc.

Have a great HR Day 😊

HR Word : Carve-Out

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Carve-out definition

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A term with two separate meanings, most commonly used to refer to medical services that are not included in a standard health insurance contract and are paid for separately – hence ‘carved out’ from the main provisions. Examples could include dental care, eye care and mental health cover. Sometimes employers will carve out cover from one company, while keeping the rest of the policy, and

A separate meaning is when a parent company sells a partial stake in a subsidiary firm in order to raise money in an IPO. Also known as a partial spinoff.

HR Word : Brown Bag Lunch

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Brown Bag Lunch definition

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Brown bag lunches are combined learning/eating events, taking place over lunchtime, where training can occur in an informal setting.

The topics covered during brown bag lunches vary widely but they generally avoid formal or work-related training and will instead focus on the fringes of professional activities e.g. making the most of networking opportunities or utilising employee reward schemes. Sometimes brown bag lunches will be purely for bonding purposes rather than learning – an employee may share photos of their wedding or insight from foreign travel.

Employees used to bring their own packed lunch to brown bag lunches. Some still do, although employers are increasing providing food, such as takeaway pizzas or sandwich platters, as an incentive for attending.