Can Analytics Help You Become a Better HR Manager?

One of the most crucial areas where managers tend to fumble is in decision making. Often, managers are exposed to a situation where they have to analyze the pros and cons of two different factors and come up with an effective solution for a crisis or project they are working on. However, in the end, it’s the gut instincts that take the final call in making decisions. As a manager, relying on instincts is fine but that won’t take you anywhere. You need to take decisions that actually add value to the project you are brainstorming for. If you are allocating resources and fixing up a deadline for a project, choosing random people who appear to be promising and assigning a random deadline on the grounds of practicality won’t help in the project’s sustenance. You need to arrive at a decision that is backed by data. You need to use analytics to figure out the best approaches to working on your projects and delivering results.

Over the last decade, the role of data in companies and startups has increased rapidly and organizations out there are reinvesting on analytics and expert data scientists for more informed decisions. As a manager, you should incorporate analytics into your everyday workflow as well. Before choosing people for your project, you need to look at their data and see how they have performed in their previous projects, their commitment levels to projects and jobs, their attendance, absenteeism, productivity index and even their responses to challenging tasks for optimized allocation of resources. All these help your project evolve in the best way possible, also allowing you to complete it before the deadline.

When you use analytics in your day to day operations, you also get comprehensive insights into information that might be new to you. For instance, attrition is normal in any organization. However, when you use analytics, you can refine information into such fragments that you can find out the real reasons for attrition and find patterns on attrition in particular departments, their frequencies and under particular managers. If you notice people from one particular department leaving in consecutive months, analytics can take you to a conclusion wherein, the fault could be on the manager, lack of motivation, poor appraisal systems, poor metrics, lack of challenging tasks or simply poaching. All these are lethal to your workforce and you have to spend your time and energy on recruiting new people and then on orienting them to your company’s culture and training them to fit their roles. Besides, this entire cycle is expensive too.

Analytics lets you foresee all of these concerns and solutions to them. As an HR manager, it is your job to maintain optimum efficiency in not just your department but in the entire workplace. Any poor candidate at the desk will redirect to your lack of recruitment skills or that of your department’s. To avoid that, you need to use analytics to analyze potential candidates’ work history, commitment, seriousness and even duration spent in each company he or she has worked with. The deeper you go into the information you have, the clearer picture you will get on people, processes and ultimately your organization.

Being an HR manager, it is also on you to bring in new culture and set new environments for adopting newer technologies for enhanced employee performances. Let this start with you upskilling to HR analytics this year.

You are bound to see a surge in employee productivity, organization growth and pave the way for excellence in your career. Get started with HR analytics today.