Essentially, HR’s current approach to analytics remains anchored in the present and the past. It’s concerned with what’s gone before rather than providing executive-level leadership with tangible evidence about what’s going to happen in the future and why that will be important to the business.
“I believe that well thought-out predictive HR analytics could become as important to the CEO as the balance sheet and P&L statement,” says Robert Bolton, a KPMG Advisory partner and HR Transformation expert in the UK.
Now is the perfect time for HR to up its analytics game for a number of reasons:
- The widespread adoption of HR management systems and cloud storage are making it easier to maintain HR data in one place and integrate it with other management information
- Software to carry out complex statistical analysis is more affordable and available
- HR systems are increasingly more integrated
- There is a general buzz around big data and data analytics
- The availability of social data is blurring the lines between HR and knowledge management
By creating a clear line of sight between HR activity and bottom-line profitability, HR analytics can provide a tangible link between an organization’s people strategy and bottom-line profitability.