Is Your HR Analytics strategy on the right path?

Is Your HR Analytics strategy on the right path?

HR Analytics has now attracted the attention of most organizations as a critical strategic effort. However, is your strategy really a “long view” strategy? OR is it just tactical? If you are like most, the focus has been on quick wins in a niche space of metrics, maybe some predictive work if you are really ahead of the curve. While this is progress, very little attention has been paid to the fact that data still has to be protected and sharing needs to be tediously controlled. In many organizations analytics has simply been limited to HR users up front. Simply providing data dumps to external tools and servers undermines many angles of cybersecurity risks as well as data privacy compliance regulations related to person data. On the other hand, data is only valuable if you can distribute it efficiently to those non-HR business stakeholders who need it to advance decision making and employee engagement efforts. Restriction of access to data and reporting is one of the main reasons many business intelligence projects fall short and never get adopted successfully.

The adoption of cloud applications has aggravated this issue by diffusing data across many niche applications in small silos where they are not easily pieced back together for analytics across functions.

4 strategic constraints of HR Analytics:

HRAnalyticsStrategy

Stakeholder Access: Getting the strategic reporting capability to non-HR users without unnecessarily compromising the data security and privacy of employee information. Reach all levels of the organization:

  • Executive
  • Region/Unit Manager
  • Line Manager
  • Employee

Privacy & Security: Excel, MS Access, flat files, etc. are NOT secure ways to replicate and store HR data.

  • Separate the atomic data from aggregate data in report deployment and access
  • Secure atomic (Employee) level data storage areas and encrypt as company or country policy requires.
  • Eliminate usage of text files, Excel sheets, MS Access for storing employee data locally and on networks (even if they are password protected).

Compliance: requires tools and data handling, storage which embraces the fast moving regulatory space (ex: EU GDPR, US EEOC, Privacy Shield, Russian OPD).

  • Build in audits for retention periods and data access and processing across all data stores.
  • Build in security role design capabilities that leverage HR segments by functional area, work country+location, country of citizenship, special protection for PII (personally identifiable data).

Data Governance: requires a consistent interpretation of data across time, geographies, and applications.

  • Heavily incorporate use of industry standards: ISO (countries, multiple currencies), HR Open, BLS, EEOC, etc.
  • Establish a global data model and data warehouse.
  • Define persistent calculations and metrics for a single version of all measures across common global dimensions independent of transactional system nuances and changes.

And for the last trick, figure out how to do all that without increasing headcount in HR and IT. Fortunately, there is a solution: FuseHR.

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