The evolution of HR analytics
INDUSTRY CONCERNS The 51st Shine HR Conclave saw hundreds of industry professionals come together to discuss analytics and the power of data, the changing HR landscape as well as challenges faced by the hiring sector
The 51st Shine HR Conclave was successfully concluded on 17 January in Hyderabad. The event brought together the leading Human Resource professionals under one roof to discuss the evolution of HR analytics and its impact on business strategy.
The conclave witnessed a packed house where hundreds of HR professionals across industries came together to discuss HR Analytics and the power of data, the changing HR landscape, the challenges and the solutions to the industry issues. They spoke on the significance of data analytics in the HR industry.
The event started with a keynote address by Dr. S. Venkata Seshaiah, Director, ICFAI. He said, “People are talking about the growing importance of Social Media, Analytics, Cloud, and Security (SMACS) and lately that has also been supplemented by new age technologies such as IOT and machine learning. If a company has to succeed, then HR as a component should be integral to all parts of the organization”. Behavioural concepts play a key role in assessing the performance of the employee. The goal of any research should be exploration and prediction. Traditional research mostly focused on data and its analysis, however now behavioural factors must also be considered to arrive at the correct analysis. This is where the importance of analytics comes in and in case of most organizations, will be essential in understanding and decoding employee behaviour.
Sriniwas CR, Associate Director, Accenture who was the moderator of the event set the tone by talking about the beginning of HR Analytics. “Measurement of data and drawing meaningful inferences to drive business decisions became important as companies realized how to quantify the data that they had collected. This was the beginning of HR analytics”.
The panel discussion was truly insightful and interactive with huge participation from the audience. Following the keynote speech, an insightful panel discussion, comprising HR leaders, like Ekta Singh, Vice President HR, Capgemini, Hrishikesh Mulay, Director-hr Cognizant, Venka Reddy, Global HR Partner of Infosys Limited, and Manoj Kumar Sharma, Head-hr, Gulf Oil Corporation, set minds thinking about the power of analytics for hiring.
The esteemed panel of speakers shared the significance of fostering an analytics-oriented culture in organizations to develop business efficiency. Ekta Singh said:“data in itself is not very useful without any insights to make it meaningful. Analytics helps to derive insights from data. With the help of analytics, HR trans- forms into a predictive unit.” Singh also pointed out that while IT companies might be better suited in terms of technology to advance the growth of analytics, it was not the IT industry that was responsible for it in the first place. She gave the example of the pharma industry as a prime example of industries that has been leveraging analytics to a large extent. According to Manoj Kumar Sharma, HR has different roles in different industries due to the difference in talent and skill sets requirement, but the role of analytics remains the same, as the end objective is always to derive operational efficiency for the organisation. At this point, the discussion turned towards the evolution of analytics.capgemini’s Hrishikesh Mulay said, “The purpose of HR analytics was to improve HR decision making process and now different companies are at different stages in terms of the analytics evolution levels. This is primarily due to the democratization of data universally.” On being asked, how the talent pool was going to look like in the future and would organizations resort to hiring data scientists or train HR personnel as data scientists, Mulay said that from a business stand point it would be better for companies to have data scientists as HR personnel but it would be an expensive proposition, thus it would make sense to encourage or enable HR personnel to be trained in the field of data science. Infosys’ Venka Reddy added that HR analytics is key to the improvement of each organization because it directly correlates with the improvement of employee morale. New age emerging technologies like IOT and big data are creating more data to analyze which in turn is helping to create better decision making. The panel discussion ended with an interactive question and answer round with the audience which was followed with a closing note by S.sreenivasamurthy, Dean & ChairmanPlacements, IPE. He emphasized on the fact that entry level salaries in the field of HR needs to be improved on priority to attract talent. According to him, organizations should provide better work life balance in order to attract better talent. To put it in simpler words, improved employee centric policies will directly result in increased morale and lower attrition rates. Talking about the conclave, Zairus Master, CEO, Shine.com said, “After the overwhelming success of our previous summits, it is great to see the response being repeated here in Hyderabad. Through these summits, we aim to provide an ideal platform for HR leaders to address key industry issues and trends. Today’s conclave has been a great success and the feedback from the participants has been extremely encouraging.”