You can Create the New People Experience in your Company
By: Dr Michael Heng
Tags: Analytics, Business Strategy, Data Science, Human Resources, Management And Leadership

Professionalism in human resource management (HRM) demands more than just experience and gut-feel. The critical role of the People Function is to make the organization stronger and ready for the post-pandemic future. The goal of the emergent Digital Human Resource Business Partner (dHRBP) is strategic transformation.

The dHRBP task is to create an exceptional “people experience” to leverage and drive the company’s human creative energy towards emboldening and empowering corporate readiness for competitive survival in the post-pandemic era. Culture and strategy, in partnership with technology, define the core focus of the dHRBP response. Without the tool of analytics powered by technology, the dHRBP is just another person with an opinion.

Current information technology can empower the dHRPB with tools to improve problem-solving, decision-making and communication process through better data collection, classification, processing and reporting. The dHRBP first determines the desired people and business data, then select and use the digital tools and platforms to gather, organize and analyze that data and apply his/her professional people insights for useful business decision-making.

The dHRBP thus provides an objective basis for an awesome people experiential impact which enhances job and income security by retaining jobs, empowering employees, unpack and embolden communication, balancing the needs of the employee and business through trust building and morale boosting.

The following are 5 notable trends in the use of People Analytics by the dHRBP:

1. Automated Recruiting/New Hire Selection

By gathering data about who best fits a position or the type of employee that the company is looking for, finding that employee can take much less time. Defining specific and measurable data for job and culture fit can be automated to weed out candidates that do not fit the requirements and shortlist those that do. Objective hiring decisions can thereafter be based on the facts and data without opinion and subjective bias.

2. Interactive Training Linked to Performance Management

Customers’ feedback can highlight specific areas for improvement and point to the data and metrics to determine performance. A virtual reality program can be developed to visualize the needed improvements. The follow-up interactive training thereafter can use customers’ feedback data during the training for better performance.

3. Reduce Employee Turnover

Data obtained from exit interviews and employee personal data-graphics allows a predictive analysis to be conducted so as to further understand the reasons behind employee turnover. The roots causes can then be addressed and reduce, if not eradicate unusual voluntary separations.

4. Employee Engagement

Gathering employees feedback data and using the insights gained, employers can visualise gap areas to create the desired engagement. The only viable and key effective employee engagement strategy is to “Communicate, Communicate, Communicate” empowered by relevant people and business analytics. They can nurture open communications and discourse among employees to innovate new ways and thinking to cope with a changed workplace in the post-pandemic era. People analytics further empower employee engagement, which embraces personal and problem counselling as well as providing stress relief, mental health and emotional support, life coaching and conflicts resolution; emboldening employees in these essential dHRBP tasks through tele-communication and mobile apps accessed from home and remote offices.

5. Performance Measurement

Using objective performance data, people analytics can track and monitor employee performance and career progression. This is conducive to the younger generations who joined with development and career advancement on their minds. People analytics can identify internal candidates for open positions. Internally qualified candidates, when promoted from within, will feel valued and motivated to stay on, thereby enhancing the knowledge base, as well as promote employee morale.

The Success Lessons from Chevron

People analytics is the systematic identification and quantification of the people drivers of business outcomes (Heuvel & Bondarouk, 2016). People analytics drive business results only when their measurable metrics unpack business-critical insights to add value to the business issues and solutions. The dHRBP is equipped with the competencies of Data Analysis Skills to make this happen.

Chevron began its journey into using data science-based analytics when it realized that there was little co-ordination among its various HR functional areas and business units. As a direct result, there was wasteful duplication of data, data collection methods and metrics as well as analysis reports.

A Team was created based in its Headquarters to standardized people metrics and produce insightful reports. The Team’s Mission was “to support Chevron’s business strategies with better, faster workforce decisions informed by data”. Among its first tasks was a global process to define and prioritise all people analytics projects in the corporate group of companies. The Team developed an in-house workforce analytic curriculum to equip in both HR and non-HR stakeholders the critical data analytical competencies, ranging from problem-solving and data analysis to statistics and visualization. A common language to establish corporate-wide understanding and ability was thus embedded.

The Team evolved a practice community of nearly 300 staff across all important divisions of the company, involving HR business partners, specialists, and analysts from around the world. The community of practice provides a forum for interested analytics professionals in the organization to learn gather virtually; share and discuss data models, showcase innovative techniques, design new standardized metrics, and develop relevant analytics programs.

Within 2 years, Chevron’s people analytics practice has significantly and dramatically reduced analytics project cycle-time with enhanced reliability for all people-related decisions. The company now has standard reports across the business for all talent metrics. The People Management Team has become a credible and indispensable Business Partner, being consulted for decisions on everything strategic and business issues spanning, but not limited to, growth, expansion, re-organisation and restructuring.

In the hands of the dHRBP, people analytics include the use of digital tools on data to measure, report, and understand employee performance and other personal and unique characteristics. The dHRBP becomes an integral part of the enterprise analytics eco-system architecture which empowers management and decision-makers to use data and information to understand every aspect of the business, including people management.

The New Digital HR Business Partner (dHRBP)

Managing data and information is not new in HRM or People Management. The People function in an organization is abundantly rich in data — recruitment data, workforce data, performance data, training data, competencies data, employee engagement data, salary data, salary equity metrics, performance-pay profiles, staff turnover or attrition data … and then some.

Traditional HR management is not usually associated with hard numbers and data; and HR practitioners are regarded more as people-centric rather than data-centric, and often not armed with objective “scientific” analytics. Traditional People Professionals therefore have been tolerated as just executives with opinions based on feely-willy gut-feel and subjective experience. Increasingly, no longer so.

The new dHRBP is emboldened and empowered by digital tools and scientific, statistical analytics as he/she engages with issues like people, culture, talent management, training, learning, employee engagement, total rewards and salary benchmarking, as well as business strategy as a valued and integral partner of enterprise analytics.

In this role, the dHRBP infuses, nurtures and cultivates a cohesive and intimate corporate sense of meaning and purpose which produce a high level of satisfaction and productivity at the workplace and marketplace. This mindset change is systemic and cultural, and creates the new People Experience.