Strategy should come first

The para­me­ters by which suc­cess­ful work­force plan­ning is judged are in a state of tran­si­tion and, despite many organ­i­sa­tions’ reliance on tech­nol­o­gy to evolve in tan­dem, many are fail­ing to align these tools with a sus­tain­able strat­e­gy.

The attri­tion and reten­tion of crit­i­cal top tal­ent is some­thing every organ­i­sa­tion needs to address and many have recog­nised the impact data ana­lyt­ics can play in these efforts. How­ev­er, to tack­le the data chal­lenge before pin­point­ing which organ­i­sa­tion­al goals this data should influ­ence is to cre­ate a chasm between front­line dig­i­tal inte­gra­tion and longer-term busi­ness ben­e­fits in the realm of human resources.

Visier’s ten-year jour­ney has revolved around turn­ing this ethos on its head, by going beyond its mar­ket-lead­ing work­force plan­ning data propo­si­tion, to a more holis­tic con­sul­ta­tive mod­el which guides com­pa­nies through the dig­i­tal HR mine­field.

“Even when cus­tomers tell us that their tal­ent attri­tion rate is at 3 to 4 per cent, so at a good lev­el, we can still find pock­ets of attri­tion occur­ring in crit­i­cal roles they didn’t even realise,” says Visier’s co-founder Jan Schwarz. “Com­bine this with wider over­lap­ping and com­plex con­sid­er­a­tions such as fair pay prac­tices, opti­mi­sa­tion of the recruit­ment fun­nel, diver­si­ty and inclu­sion con­sid­er­a­tions, and count­less oth­er use-cas­es, then you begin to see why a peo­ple ana­lyt­ics propo­si­tion such as ours is so pop­u­lar.

“How­ev­er, what we’re ulti­mate­ly try­ing to undo is an indus­try trend where­by com­pa­nies have been encour­aged to apply data first and find busi­ness improve­ment lat­er.”

Visi­er strives to tem­per this instinc­tive and ingrained over-reliance on data to deduce strat­e­gy, effec­tive­ly revers­ing the process so strat­e­gy dri­ves data opti­mi­sa­tion instead.

Schwarz says: “To real­ly and tru­ly enact scal­able deci­sion-mak­ing, you have to have a bal­ance between effec­tive data gov­er­nance in tan­dem with pre­cise peo­ple ana­lyt­ics strat­e­gy. We believe com­pa­nies should begin with the lat­ter, rather than div­ing in prod­uct first.”

A host of blue-chip organ­i­sa­tions, includ­ing Pit­ney Bowes, Exper­ian, Anglo Amer­i­can and Mer­ck, have report­ed back more accu­rate results and enhanced finan­cial returns as a result of gar­ner­ing a bet­ter under­stand­ing of their busi­ness­es from a tal­ent man­age­ment per­spec­tive from the out­set.

It might sound ground­break­ing, but in fact areas such as sales and mar­ket­ing have been lever­ag­ing this approach for some time, mak­ing HR’s adop­tion of a strat­e­gy-first ethos all the more impor­tant, yet no less com­pli­cat­ed.

“Over the years, work­force data has been very dif­fi­cult to deal with, incred­i­bly siloed and not eas­i­ly struc­tured for data ana­lysts to work with in con­junc­tion with oth­er depart­men­tal data,” says Schwarz. “HR has sub­se­quent­ly played it safe and focused more on the oper­a­tional and trans­ac­tion­al side of things, instead of the all-impor­tant strat­e­gy.”

When Visi­er engages in con­ver­sa­tions around work­force plan­ning to this end, all too often the ini­tial response delves into human cap­i­tal sys­tem iter­a­tions or the next quick-fix tool.

“This is instead of a chief exec­u­tive or chief oper­at­ing offi­cer lay­ing out their top three or five pri­or­i­ties for the upcom­ing year,” says Schwarz. “We are urg­ing these com­pa­nies to change the dynam­ic, to align their peo­ple prac­tices to wider organ­i­sa­tion­al tar­gets, and to then allo­cate the req­ui­site resources and tools to meet these aims.”

The need to get this process right is being com­pound­ed and cloud­ed at present by extra pres­sure at board lev­el, many demand­ing HR infor­ma­tion that cur­rent­ly isn’t attain­able with­out data-dri­ven solu­tions. Accu­ra­cy and scal­a­bil­i­ty of this data is, cor­rect­ly, deemed piv­otal to con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, but it’s impor­tant not to rush the process in response to these demands.

“A holis­tic view of the work­force is the only way to under­stand all the con­tribut­ing fac­tors that go towards work­force man­age­ment,” Schwarz con­cludes. “We off­set risk by not only shift­ing the data mind­set, but by then high­light­ing how data opti­mi­sa­tion across HR can tie into wider busi­ness aspi­ra­tions and depart­ment-spe­cif­ic con­sid­er­a­tions.

“Ulti­mate­ly, organ­i­sa­tions need to con­sid­er the hard met­rics of busi­ness devel­op­ment when analysing the soft­er areas of deci­sion-mak­ing to pos­i­tive­ly impact their future work­force.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.visier.com