Source | LinkedIn | David Green | People Analytics leader | Director, Insight222 & myHRfuture.com | Conference speaker | Host, Digital HR Leaders Podcast
According to a study from the Corporate Research Forum, published in Nov 2017, 69% of companies with 10,000 employees or more now have a people analytics team.
Consequently, there has been a swell of talent entering the field and increased expectations from business leaders that HR professionals need to improve their data literacy.
Perhaps it was not surprising therefore that the headline finding of the HR Skills of the Future Report we published earlier this year at myHRfuture saw people analytics emerge as the most in-demand skill HR professionals wanted to learn in 2019.
With a number of studies consistently reporting the positive business impact of people analytics (see examples in FIG 1), it is fairly safe to predict that the field will continue to grow in the years ahead.
FIG 1: The business value of people analytics (Source: myHRfuture, Bersin by Deloitte, Sierra-Cedar and Visier)
Developing a Data-Driven Culture
With all this positive business value, the key then is to develop a data-driven culture throughout HR. A 2018 Harvard Business Review article, by my former IBM colleagues Nigel Guenole and Sheri Feinzig on how to develop a data-savvy HR department, summarised that three types of people currently co-exist in HR: the analytically savvy, the analytically willing and the analytically resistant.
