What HR professionals can learn from a Talent and People Analytics Accelerator workshop

Recently we were delighted to run a stimulating Talent and People Analytics Workshop event and meet many passionate HR leaders. The 3-hour event was co-sponsored and hosted by our friends at IBM talent analytics team at the IBM Client Centre in London.

Jeff Wellstead and I facilitated, supported by Alex Gibson (Solutions Consultant – People Analytics – IBM/Kenexa) and Matt Nowell (Executive Solutions Consultant – IBM Smarter Workforce).

Shaping talent strategies linked to business outcomes, understanding workforce trends and developing great leaders are all part of the future of HR.

The goal of the event was to provide an educational and interactive workshop. In order to support the end-to-end journey of deciding on workforce analytics as a function, designing an approach, engaging with vendors for people analytics and shaping strategic decisions.

Demonstrating how you can move from ‘HR for HR sake’ projects, to providing strategic insights to the business.

The primary objectives were:

• To educate HR execs and professionals about what talent analytics entails.
• Show how software tools are aiding our advanced understanding of deeper insights across employee populations, their behaviour and improving their overall performance.

HR need to embrace change and transformation but does not always have the background nor historical remit to proceed. In the last two years over 500 new HR software capabilities have come online within the functional HR remit alone.

The workshop was an excellent opportunity to speak first-hand with HR professionals from a range of industries, and hear a range of challenges faced.

The talent and people analytics workshop highlighted a typical gap in understanding the nature of using analytics to support talent insights, even though there are numerous publicly available case studies and tools to support rapid insight capabilities.

Education and awareness raising are critical for the HR function today as so little are known about these new powerful tools.

This may be because historically HR has had little or no influence on business strategy. However, there has been a cultural change in the past 15 years in how organisations respond to data, mainly driven by the shift in marketing towards data-driven analysis and move to digital.

People analytics is not a dashboard, but projects set out to identify the drivers that impact the bottom line of our organisation and contribute to reaching commercial targets.

Attendees at the November event ranged from Head of HR to Senior Director and VP, across marketing, recruitment, insurance, SaaS solutions and financial services sectors.

Here is what some of them said:

If you would like to learn more about talent and people analytics, please get in touch. We are planning more educational events designed to help in a highly practical way. There is also the option to run it directly at your premises, focusing on the particular issues you face.

Typical talent and people analytics workshop agenda:

• What workforce analytics is, and is not
• Most common misconceptions and barriers related to workforce analytics projects and implementations
• HR analytics for improved business outcomes; understanding how to develop sales/revenue generation through Discovery, Data, Analysis and Storytelling
• Talent Insight demonstration
• Developing a case that enhances HR’s strategic value; critical steps toward becoming an analytics capable HR team

Digital Works have specialist digital transformation and HR knowledge and experience. We can help you build a business case to start a project, and support you through streamlining the efficient delivery of your project. We can also help you with solution and vendor selection.

For more information and an informal chat please get in touch

Read more by Elise Korolev, here

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