People Analytics – Gaining Speed

People analytics is a data-based approach to improve people related decision-making throughout an organisation, impacting both HR and business units. After several years of being “stuck in neutral”, people analytics has emerged as a key priority for leaders, with 77% of organisations regarding it as important.

The 2016 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report identified disruptive global forces that are driving the demand for leaders to reorganise and redesign their organisations. Such forces include the emergence of a more diverse, dynamic workforce, the digitisation and datafication of the workplace and the continued War on Talent. Leaders are looking to data to figure out what makes people join and stay with the organisation, who is most likely to be successful, and what can be done to build more leadership, customer service, and innovation capabilities—all of which can be directly informed by effective people analytics.

Companies are actively hiring people analytics staff, cleaning up their data for analysis, and developing predictive models that help transform their business. Vendors have developed off the shelf analytics technology, creating accessible, adaptable and readily available people analytics solutions. As analytics moves into the corporate mainstream, organisations that are still in the early stages of adopting technology and building teams with data skills risk being left behind. In the not-too-distant future, it will become impossible to make any HR decisions without analytics; it will be a fundamental requirement for the effective HR business partner.