- Hello, and welcome to AIHR Live.
I'm Erik van Vulpen, and with me is Dave Millner.
Hi Dave, how are you doing?
- Hi, I'm fine Erik thanks.
Fantastic, today we're going to talk
a bit about HR analytics.
Dave, what I wanna ask you first is what is all of the areas
of HR analytics that you're the most excited about,
that trigger you the most.
- I think the things that are most exciting
is the opportunity that predictive analytics gives.
I think particularly when you're able to draw on
past information and data, that things starts
to shape the opportunities in terms of what if we did this,
that could happen.
And for me, I think that's the most exciting,
because I think to then put that into
a business context and to bring that to life,
starting to say if we recruit in this way,
or if we do all of it in this way, it will bring us this
from what we're projecting.
That for me, I think, is a really exciting opportunity
that will take for HR to get it's head around,
but I think that's really exciting.
- I agree, and I think it will take quite sometime
for HR to wrap it's head around it,
'cause there's still a lot of talk
about predictive analytics and everything it can do.
What you see in practice is a lot of organizations
are still at a basic, or an advanced reporting level
not even thinking about making predictions,
even though all the value in the end is
in making predictions and knowing what's going
to happen in the future.
- And I think it comes down to data quality,
which we've always talked about as being an issue.
It takes time for that to happen,
and people data is not as good as it should be.
But I think over a time we will get to that point.
But that is the area of analytics that excites me
the most, because I think it makes sense when you project it
back to a business leader.
They get it, they understand it,
and it's not too hypothetical,
if you ground it in research that you've done previously.
- Now it's interesting that you also mention data quality,
'cause something I've been very excited about
in the last few months, is how you can adjust
your HR systems in a way that you can ensure
that the data will come out having a higher quality.
Like very simple things like certain mandatory field stats,
some business monitor or some
administrative people in HR just don't put any data in
'cause they just don't have the data,
but it's a mandatory field so they have to put in
a zero or a one, and you've got a big grill of messy data.
I think that's also something that excites me very much,
the data integrity and how you can maintain
a high quality of data through just smarter system design.
- Yes, no I think you're right.
And I think also that getting the HR practitioners
to be a little bit more numerically orientated
and understanding the implications of what their decisions
are having on that data set, I think is important.
But it takes time, and you know, you probably
didn't join HR because you like data and technology
and analytics, so it will take a little bit of time
for people to understand that we're not trying
to transform you into another finance person,
for want of a better word.
- Yeah, yeah, so one of the areas that a lot of people
are very excited about lately has been ONA,
Organizational Network Analysis.
What's your thought about, what are you thinking about it?
Is it a bit bit over hyped, is it something
that has tangible benefits for the business?
What is your feeling?
- Yeah, there's been a lot of noise about it.
And I think it's got definite benefits,
particularly when we're looking at things
such as mergers, such as collaboration,
and trying to break down why is this not happening,
and why should we be doing things differently.
So, I do think that ONA can help in that respect.
I'm just wondering whether it's a little big brother
is looking at you?
I'm just a little concerned about that perhaps.
And I'm just worried that people might get seduced
by the sexy new stuff,
when I think there's a lot
of work that HR's gotta do to get the basics right.
Whether it's reporting, metrics,
advanced reporting, predictive.
I think all of those sorts of things we really
need to focus on, I don't want them to
get distracted by ONA,
but I also don't want them to forget that
that is an opportunity to give you a different lens
through which to look at the way that people do things.
I guess my word of caution is that complex analysis
doesn't always give you complex and sophisticated outcomes
so we just need to be mindful of what it can do,
and also is it really the right thing for you
to be focusing on?
- No, I think that that's an excellent point
and something that you have the analytic maturity
model and that they say your descriptive analytics
and then your advanced analytics and then you go
to predictive analytics that's at the higher
level of maturity or some business questions you can just
simply answer without needing the higher maturity
which implicitly says like, hey is mature too,
it's a better version, even though you might even need it.
- And who's to say in three or four years time,
with this sort of cognitive smart technology,
who's to say that maybe a lot of that routineness will
be done for us, which that will be amazing.
But I think we're along way away from it.
But, nevertheless, we've gotta be mindful
that hopefully one day we will be in that position.
- Yeah, that will be very interesting.
- Yeah.
- So analytics is evolving, and in the last few years
we've seen analytics get a foot in the door
in the HR departments,
and it's enough for most larger companies.
Analytics I see getting taken more and more seriously.
Do you see analytics going to the heart of the organization?
Is analytics going to be a core part of HR?
- I think it's going to be a fundamentally important part.
I don't think it is the center of everything for HR.
I personally think there are three elements
that derive and shape the future of HR.
I think one is certainly the data and analytics.
It's an important part of the jigsaw.
I think technology is a critical part
because that's the thing that will feed us with data,
with insights, with information and provide an experience
that employees will say, wow, this is almost like
being at home type of thing.
And I think the third, and probably the most important,
is the capability of the HR practitioner themselves.
It's pointless having great analytics, great technology,
if the HR practitioners are still operating
in a rather more old fashioned, second class citizen
partner orientated way.
I think they're gotta be regarding themselves
as thought leaders.
They gotta be challenging the business,
and driving them in a direction that will add value.
And I think those three elements complement each other,
but I don't think you can do one without the other.
That's my take on it.
- That's interesting, 'cause those three I think
are the key enablers to everything you do in HR.
- Yeah.
- Technology is maybe the most massive enabler,
so is the date that feeds into the output
of the technology.
It should be the data that feeds into the algorithms,
that approaches making the smarter decisions.
And the capabilities are really able what you do
with the technology, what do you do with the data,
how do you implement the policies in HR
and how do you bring them to fruition
and get the most of them, out of them.
- Yeah, and I think the digital transformation,
the digital agenda is definitely raising it's head
and giving CHROs who've been talking to me
have been saying, you know, I think we may need
to do something to help our HR practitioners
on that journey, because it's not gonna be simple.
It's about change, it's technology, challenging,
really promoting, looking at the outside
and bringing some new ideas.
So it's a really complicated role that HR has,
both today and tomorrow.
But we really need to give them some support and help,
and I think that's why I'm starting to see quite a lot
of help being asked for in the HR world.
Which is only good news for analytics and HR, obviously.
- (laughing) That's true.
What I want to focus on is two of those enablers
that you mentioned.
You mentioned technology, and you mentioned analytics.
How do those two integrate with each other?
How do, 'cause I think there's potentially
a huge synergy between the two.
- Yeah, I'm absolutely with you.
I think part of this data quality that we talked
about a little earlier is because the technology
is not aligned, it's not simple, it's not providing us
with the information we want when we need it.
It's hardly surprising that people
don't want to do analytics when they've got
20 different spread sheets to pull together.
And I think we've gotta try and find and work
on systems that are built for the future,
just not today.
And I think the technology vendors have gotta big role
to play in not just alluding to what the future
looks like, but actually providing them with concrete
evidence that this is where we'll stay,
this is the road map for tomorrow,
this is how we're gonna get there.
This is what it will then do
and these are the features
and this is what it's got to provide.
And I think that's where there's an interesting dilemma
between HR start ups and the more traditional vendors
and I can see a lot of the start ups are making
a lot of traction because they're able to be incredibly
responsive in a very quick way to the needs
of what some of the large organizations,
and more medium size are looking for.
So I think there is definitely a connection between the two.
But we've gotta get the technology right,
because otherwise we're continually questioning
the data and having to go look for it.
And that's not good for anybody.
- Yeah, I agree, but on the other hand,
what you also see is that those smaller HR technology firms
are creating very tailor made solutions,
very specific solutions so they do them really well
compared to the big vendors who offer one size fits all
and that just doesn't work for some areas
of learning and development, or other HR diciplines.
So what's on the other hand also worries me
about technology is that you see, I know a company
here in the Netherlands that used to have I think
80 different, like eight zero, 80 different
HR apps that they were using for the employees so they could
do everything in a self-servicing matter.
Although all the data coming out of those tools
wasn't thought about,
hey what are we gonna do with the data,
and how can we gonna integrate the data
that we can do a couple of year's analytics,
a little more advanced predictive analytics
that you mentioned before.
So, I think there's also, there should be in a way
a shift in the thinking about how are we gonna leverage
those technology and how are we gonna align
those technologies in the end to map the employee
journey to now, hey these employees are coming in,
and so we have the application tracking system,
we have all those fancy new selection tools
that we are using now, how can we get all the data
aggregated and use it in our analytics department
to make better decisions about recruitment,
about hiring, about sourcing maybe even all the way
to the exit interviews.
How can you map that employee journey
and do that as well as possible
using those those technologies?
- I think you're right, I think the aggregator,
or the platform integrator or whatever word
you wanna use is definitely the key to all of these apps.
And I think the other thing we need to be mindful of
is that we've also gotta be able to bring in
non-people data, such as business outcomes,
KPIs whatever it may be.
Because that will then ultimately make the analytical
process easier for the team or the HR practitioner
who has to do it.
So, it's not an easy journey,
and the reason no one size fits all,
but I just think that the ultimate solution
of having access to the data when you need it,
in the type of ways that you can use it
just sounds really exciting.
But I think part of the challenge here is
does HR want to get to that point,
because it means, therefore, that the administration
will have disappeared.
It therefore means we've gotta focus
on these critical processes, talent and all of that,
workforce planning, etc.
We're gonna need to focus on those,
so things really properly.
And we've just gotta make sure that we're not relying
upon HR people who are in the comfort zone
of liking to do things the old way.
And that's no disrespect, but life is moving on.
And maybe the profession is also moving on, hopefully.
- Yeah, let's hope so.
There's always a funny story I like to tell
that when I was still studying
and I was doing some teaching.
The father of the university students came in
and usually you didn't have to talk to parents
of university students, so it was always a bit funny
for the one specific course,
and he asked me, hey what do you do in this.
I study INO psychology.
And he said, oh there's something funny,
'cause recently I had to apply for a job again
'cause I quit my company, and he had stayed
there for 20, 25 years, and he had made an number
of internal promotions.
And he said I applied to a different company
for the first or the second time, or first time
in his life, because he had been working so long
at the original company.
And he said, you know, what was so funny,
that the process I went through, the recruitment process
it hasn't changed a bit since I first did it
25 years ago, and he said that was so mind boggling
that nothing changed in 25 years.
I'm still doing the same conversation,
they're still doing the same assessments.
It's still the exact same process
and nothing really has changed.
And I think that for me has always been
a motivator of, hey, how can we anyhow change
the HR department for real.
'Cause if you haven't been changed for 25 years,
in today's world, that's quite a hurdle.
- No, no, and it's funny, 'cause when I was
working in a bank,
in an internal HR function,
our big thing was about having interviews
that were evidenced based.
And we're talking today about evidence based HR.
And I'm like, that's just the same thing
we were talking about years ago.
But, we will get there.
But I think there is a big education piece we've got
in terms of how do we get line managers to understand
that this is a better way of doing things.
And I think we are not sure we've really actively focused
on how we can education leaders and managers
about why we believe this is the best way to do it.
But anyway, that's another day's conversation probably.
- And that's true, and I think you
hit the nail right on the head.
One thing that I, one last question, one final question
I had, and I think you already partially answered it,
that is about the future of HR.
Where do you see analytics develop in the near future?
- I think the, it's interesting.
You've got a lot of what I would call leaders
in the field.
So a lot of larger corporates have got analytical teams,
and they're very much pushing the analytical agenda.
And that's amazing.
They're the ones that present to all the conferences.
They're the ones that are telling their story.
And that's great.
I think that the thing that is still a bit frustrating,
is that we have a lot of the smaller organizations,
which are probably 500 to 2000 employees.
Those for me are the ones where if you introduce analytics
they could really make a huge impact.
And I'm not quite sure that we've really captured
hearts and minds for that group yet.
I know the data sets will be smaller.
I know it will be more difficult to get correlations
because we haven't got that, the number of volume
of data available.
But I just feel that when we start to get analytics
into organizations of that size,
then we're starting to really build momentum
for this as being a core part of the HR function.
But we will get there, but I think we've still got
a lot of work to do.
We shouldn't just be promoting the fact
that the large corporates
are doing it and doing it amazingly well.
How can we integrate this down
into the smaller organizations?
Because I think they can make radical changes
very quickly, and I'd just love to see analytics
driving that within their organizations.
- Yeah, that's interesting.
We see a similar thing on the website,
where we get a lot of traffic
on the pure HR analytics terms, where people want
to know about predictive analytics and how to do it.
And for us, that's maybe a population that's working
at the larger companies.
And we also get a lot of traffic simply on there.
How do we measure performance without
performance matches?
What are the most common matches you can use
in your recruitment process?
And I have the feeling that a lot of the interest,
that's driving those metrics questions are coming
from slightly smaller organizations that also
want to get going,
and just very, type go to Google and type in
what are the recruitment metrics I can use?
See I definitely think that that's the next step,
although the analytics evolution in a sense,
of hey, how can we bring, maybe not necessarily analytics,
at least the data driven approach
to the smaller companies as well.
- No, definitely.
It's all about the evidence and the data
that you've got to back it up.
So, it is important, please don't get me wrong,
but I think it's more than just the analytics and data.
I think if we get that technology right,
and get the HR people thinking and behaving
in a different way, that for me, the three elements
will really drive the future of HR.
- It effects those data and analytics,
if I summarize this correctly, it's the capability
in the end that's most important.
And it's the technology.
Those are the three main enablers we try to push off
everything we do in analytics.
And that's a new one.
- And that will give us a commercial HR function.
What more do you want?
- Dave, thank you
very much for participating. - Pleasure.
- And thank you very much for watching AIHR live.
And I think Cocoa, our office dog also made an appearance.
She's a beautiful dog.
I hope you really liked this episode.
I'll see you in the next one.