HR analytics needed to maximize workforce performance

Posted by: Yellowfin Team

A recent Ventana Research study – Workforce Analytics and Business Intelligence: Understanding and Improving Workforce Performance – has shown that most large organizations are not getting full-value from their human capital because their HR department does not use analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) tools in workforce performance management.

Of the 298 survey respondents, located predominantly in North America, few indicated that they use workforce performance analytics and those that did were generally dissatisfied with them.

The report shows that many HR departments placed in charge of managing workforce-related analytics and metrics lack the support and skills necessary to undertake the role.

Lack of IT support to deliver workforce BI

Under half of all respondents said they receive adequate IT support to allow them to undertake reporting and analysis of key workforce performance metrics.

Lack of skill

Additionally, only half of all survey respondents directly involved in HR, said they possessed the training and skills necessary to generate workforce-related analytics and metrics, to report on workforce performance for management.

Outdated technology rouses dissatisfaction

Over half of HR professionals surveyed do not have access to the workforce metrics that they’re responsible for, with 28 percent lacking any access to key workforce metrics.

The predominant reasons offered for this lack of access were:

  • The unavailability of individual dashboards and/or easy-to-use BI tools (existing products are not personalized and are hard to use)
  • The inconvenience and difficulty of having to manually retrieve data rather than having it reported to them

Compounding this discovery, over two-thirds of HR organizations surveyed were unsatisfied with their overall workforce metrics reporting and analytics system.

Respondents listed lack of personal access to their current workforce metrics software technology as the leading reason for their dissatisfaction with their current metrics analysis and reporting system.

HR needs timely access to workforce metrics

Over one-third of surveyed companies update their workforce metrics four times a year or more. A process reported to take anywhere between one and six weeks. A measly 14 percent of respondents said their company could produce the required metrics within a single day.

ERP and HRMS drop the ball

The study found that HR users were also dissatisfied with the amount of functionality offered and the ability of human resource management systems (HRMSs) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to meet their workforce performance analytics needs.

Less than half of survey respondents said their organization had an ERP system that included a human resources management function. Of that, a mere 43 percent of organizations said they used their HRMS to access workforce metrics.

Lack of managerial support a barrier to BI implementation

Over two-thirds of those organizations surveyed recognized the limitations of their current workforce data reporting and analytics systems. But, their ability to address the issue, was inhibited by a lack of executive support for improving the state of analytics and BI in workforce performance measurement.

Yellowfin can help

All these factors mean that HR departments, and organizations at large, face a difficult challenge to improve workforce performance.

The study concludes that “there is a clear opportunity for vendors of general-purpose BI applications to tune their products for this emerging market.”

But equally, if HR departments and companies take advantage of the benefits that pervasive easy-to-use BI solutions offer, they too stand to benefit greatly.

Those keen to improve their workforce performance should look for a BI reporting and analytics tool to support their HR department that is:

  • Cost-effective, easy to deploy and integrate with existing infrastructure to reduce managerial reluctance to implement wide-spread reporting and analytics
  • Easy-to-access with individual dashboards and customizable, scheduled data delivery, to give end-users the data they want, how and when the want it
  • Easy-to-use, highly intuitive and 100 percent Web-based so that anyone comfortable using a web browser, can easily analyze and take advantage of a broad range of key HR metrics
  • Maintained and supported with a minimum of fuss to free-up IT personnel

And by some strange coincidence, that’s exactly what we do. Yellowfin meets this emerging HR reporting and analytics challenge in two ways:

  • We supply our BI solution to HR professionals
  • We also work with a number of HRMS vendors to help them deliver accessible world-class workforce metrics for their clients

Yellowfin is making HR Business Intelligence easy.

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