In advance of Chairing People Analytics World 2018 in April, David Green shares a few thoughts on his experiences and predictions in HR Analytics...
David is a globally recognised and respected influencer, speaker and writer on People Analytics, data-driven HR and the future of work. He has chaired People Analytics World and People Analytics Forum for the last four years. David has also spoken at and/or chaired conferences in 25+ cities around the globe over the last 18 months including Sydney, London, Paris, Singapore, New York, San Francisco, Moscow, Helsinki, Amsterdam and Berlin.
For how long has your work involved analytics, either directly or in project leadership?
I've been involved in the people analytics field first as a writer, speaker and community builder, and subsequently also as an advisor and consultant since 2012.
For how long have you worked in the HR domain?
I started as a recruiter back in 1997 and aside from a five year sojourn in France, where I worked in the technology sector, I have been involved in the HR domain ever since across a breadth of roles including sales, consulting and solutions design.
How well do you feel People Analytics is progressing?
On the whole, the discipline is progressing well: interest levels have never been so high and according to recent research by Deloitte, 69% of large organisations have now established a people analytics team. I believe progress will continue to track upwards particularly as the scope of work undertaken by people analytics teams continues to deepen and broaden. People analytics teams are increasingly expanding their remit to include areas such as assessment, employee experience and also the design of products aimed at providing value to employees.
What have been the greatest challenges that you've faced within People Analytics?
Although interest in and adoption of people analytics continues to rise, there are are a number of common challenges facing the majority of people analytics leaders. These include obstacles such as credibility, capability, data quality and diversity as well as ethics and privacy concerns. The biggest barrier to creating sustainable capability across the organisations I've worked with lies in the need to create a data-driven culture of decision making in HR. This is not easy and requires the need to engage, excite, equip and enable HR business partners.
What are your predictions for 2018 and beyond? Where are things heading?
I expect adoption to continue to rise as people analytics shifts from the periphery to the core of the HR function of the future. Some trends to look out for include:
1) The growth of people analytics in line with companies undertaking digital HR transformation - analytics is a core capability to enable this
2) The emergence of analytics based products that help personalise HR processes such as learning, career development and mobility, automate parts of processes such as talent acquisition and onboarding, and empower employees by providing them with access to data and insights to support productivity, work-life balance and wellbeing
3) The rise of organisational network analysis particularly with passive data sources such as email, in/external social media and collaboration tools - these will provide new insights on productivity, collaboration and performance from both an individual, team and organisational level
4) Ethics and data privacy will continue to be a 'hot' topic particularly as the implications of GDPR are fully realised and as people analytics teams seek to include new and emerging data sources.