Executives in Australia are increasingly turning to talent analytics to derive insights on outcomes such as employee attrition, performance and sentiment to influence talent and business decisions. While many leaders value the availability of this data, few feel confident their organisation is maximising its potential.

According to Gartner research, 78 per cent of HR leaders say their organisation relies more heavily on talent data to make decisions compared to four years ago. However, 71 per cent agree that current team structures and capabilities limit their ability to use these insights effectively.

To be successful, HR leaders need to focus on developing the skills of their HR team members to help them become:

1. Analytics experts who manage and prepare the data to produce insights 
2. Decision enablers who interpret the information and apply learnings
3. Strategic consultants who influence broader business priorities as tactical communicators.

Doing so will enable talent analytics to influence HR’s biggest functional decisions and act as a central driver of innovation throughout the organisation by providing objective and timely advice.

Building a culture of analytical learning

Skilled talent analytics experts play a crucial role within any organisation. They are responsible for maintaining data, effectively analysing it and supporting an integrated approach to workforce planning and risk management, among other strategic activities. 

To develop analytics experts, HR leaders must build a culture of technical learning within their team. This can be achieved by fostering collaboration between those responsible for talent analytics and the learning and development (L&D) team. 

This will help HR leaders identify technical skills gaps within the team and create learning pathways that ensure employees stay ahead of new methods and technologies. 

Rotational programs with IT or data and analytics functions can also be introduced to bolster technical skills and knowledge. 

“Traditional earning mechanisms won’t be enough. A core competency that drives effective decision enablement is the business acumen that can only be gained through experience.”

Using data-driven HR to develop strong decision makers

Gartner research reveals only nine per cent of HR leaders feel their department has been truly successful at arming their team with data to enable them to support workforce-related business decisions. 

Given that talent processes can be disrupted by external changes and technology, HR decision-makers need uninterrupted access to relevant data to gain a deep understanding of HR’s priorities and activities. 

The L&D function can also be an invaluable partner here by facilitating regular knowledge exchanges on priorities, emerging trends and insights between talent analytics experts and HR leaders. 

However, traditional learning mechanisms won’t be enough. A core competency that drives effective decision enablement is the business acumen that can only be gained through experience.

Developing true business acumen and the underlying competencies of industry, organisational and financial knowledge is best achieved through a combination of classic development activities combined with high-impact, hands-on learning moments.

For example, providing HR team members with the opportunity to work in cross-functional teams to lead change initiatives, build and execute business cases or play a significant role in delivering a solution can transform by-the-book thinkers into strategic problem solvers and innovators.

From tactical directives that respond to changing business conditions to supporting the entire employee life cycle, this approach ensures leaders can make data-driven talent decisions with confidence.  

Becoming a strategic partner

Executives and business leaders often face many competing priorities, particularly when managing the interests of shareholders, internal stakeholders and customers. As a result, HR leaders can struggle to effectively influence their decision making, even when equipped with data or insights.

According to a Gartner survey, 81 per cent of talent analytics leaders state that it’s important for their team to be proficient in strategic consulting. However, less than half (47 per cent) are currently satisfied with their team’s proficiency.

Rather than focusing on relationship management approaches designed to drive stakeholder satisfaction, strategic consultants should build and hone skills such as persuasion and storytelling with data, which can empower HR to be more effective in their dealings with stakeholders. 

To do this, consultants need to develop a deeper understanding of their business stakeholders’ needs and drivers, along with demonstrating the impact of their interactions. 

Feedback from business stakeholders and measures of consultants’ performance should go beyond the basics of capturing face-to-face time to collect real evidence of when HR insights have resulted in action.

Similarly to decision enablers, strategic consultants benefit from connecting with other department leads or C-suite members, fostering partnerships between talent analytics and other functions. Creating these relationships allows for the sharing of best practices and can help inform talent analytics teams about which HR technologies (e.g., data visualisation tools) are the most effective for sharing insights with stakeholders.

HR leaders who can implement these steps will be well-placed to grow their talent analytics function, increase their credibility, influence innovation and drive critical business decisions. 

Robin Boomer is a Senior Director, Advisory in Gartner’s HR Practice. He provides strategic advice and insights to support HR leaders and strategic workforce planning teams.

Understand the principles of data-driven decision making and learn to apply a data-driven mindset to HR strategies and challenges with AHRI’s foundational short course in People Analytics. Take the advanced course to elevate your workforce data management and analytical skills in a business context.

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For Tanya Hammond FCPHR, CEO Chief Collaborator at Tailored HR Solutions, the recent rise of data-driven HR is a welcome and long-overdue change.

“I realised pretty early in my career that I had a knack for analysing complex problems and finding creative solutions. It was and still is my passion. I always liked to understand the ‘why’,” says Hammond, who is also the former Chair of AHRI’s Research advisory panel. “So, working in HR, I really wanted to understand what draws people in and what keeps them in an organisation.”

Hammond’s 35-year career as an HR practitioner, consultant and academic began with a graduate recruitment role. It was a valuable stepping stone for Hammond’s career, as it gave her a critical understanding of talent pipelines and the importance of creating a safe and inclusive environment. However, later in her career, she began to learn that her skills were more suited to the big-picture side of HR and workforce strategy.

“HR has to be really proactive and responsive – that’s just life,” she says. “As a practitioner, I found I was often being drawn into putting out fires. But if you’re doing that, you’re not as involved with [large-scale] employment issues and trends, and how they link to the organisation.

“What I started to realise was, I wanted to spend time looking at the workforce as a whole and understand the risks that might be encountered. It was the nerd in me wanting to use that data and take an evidence-based approach to finding risks and solutions.”

HR need to become data storytellers

It was Hammond’s knack for turning data into solutions that led her to workforce planning. Since leaving her role as an HR practitioner, she has worked with a number of organisations in the finance sector, a large consulting firm and subsequently her own firm, Tailored HR Solutions. 

This firm predominantly works with clients across the Australian government sector, leading HR-related initiatives involving strategic workforce planning, capability development, people analytics, strategic analysis and workforce strategy design.

One of the biggest lessons she has taken from her academic and professional experience is that effective workforce planners need to be able to tell a compelling story with data.

“HR are the keepers of so much data and information about the workforce,” she says. “[It’s about] taking that data and connecting it to the business at an organisational level – being able to tell a story about trends, insights, potential risks, and subsequent impacts [now and in the future]. To succeed, HR must partner with the business to establish an understanding of the high-demand and necessary workforce skills and capabilities, required capacity and performance and take action to influence these outcomes – that’s an incredibly important skill.”

In today’s world of work, it’s not just the HR field where data storytelling is a coveted skill. According to research by Robert Half Australia, data analytics was the second most sought-after capability by CIOs in 2022, cited by 64 per cent of respondents. The only skill more in-demand was cybersecurity (65 per cent). CIOs were willing to pay an additional salary premium of 30 per cent to secure data analytics skills.

Hammond’s experience in workforce planning has involved plenty of myth-busting when it comes to employers’ perceptions of the labour market. Often, leaders assume that essential capabilities are in short supply at their organisation due to unavoidable skills shortages, whereas in fact the issue is more related to the attractiveness of an employer’s offerings and its market reputation, she says. By demonstrating these truths to management through concrete data and examples, workforce planners can influence not only strategy, but also the quality of the employee experience.

“One thing that is really important for HR professionals [in this field] is cultivating that deep curiosity to understand both people and the organisation, because we have to be a voice to both,” she says. 

“We need to be able to take critical thinking skills and business acumen to the problems that we encounter in HR, and, importantly, we need to learn how to be consultative and comfortable in data and the translation to insights and action. We can’t shy away from that anymore, particularly in our volatile world, and in the face of rapid advances in technology and capabilities [like AI].”

Can ‘just anyone’ work in HR?

Since Hammond entered the HR field in the 80s, she has noted a significant amount of change in the way HR is widely perceived.

This is in part due to the increased credibility that HR has gained through the advent of professional certification via AHRI, she says. Moreover, HR’s increasing visibility was accelerated during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

“HR gained a lot more credibility in that time. It showcased what HR could really do. We leaned in and helped to solve some very complex problems very quickly, and the role of HR got elevated through that process to a whole different level. I think we’re still seeing that being played out in organisations.”

“Being good at cutting things up isn’t enough to make you a good surgeon, and watching Law and Order doesn’t make you a good lawyer. You need more than that, and it’s the same in HR.” –  Tanya Hammond FCPHR, CEO Chief Collaborator at Tailored HR Solutions

Hammond has recently undertaken research at UNSW, Canberra, exploring whether ‘just anyone’ can do HR, which she explains was a relatively widely held view in the early stages of her career. However, the results so far have indicated that this assumption is off the mark.

“Being good at cutting things up isn’t enough to make you a good surgeon, and watching Law and Order doesn’t make you a good lawyer. You need more than that, and it’s the same in HR,” she says. 

“There are certain behaviours and capabilities and knowledge required to be able to do it effectively. Just liking people is not going to make you a great HR practitioner. 

It’s much more complex than that.”

UNSW’s research has also uncovered some interesting findings on the common traits of successful HR professionals.

“The big surprise for me was around the journey of an HR practitioner and how we come into HR from lots of different avenues. And more often than not, the people who were identified as high-performing practitioners were people who’d fallen into the field.

“However, another thing that most of the high-performing individuals [had in common] was that they recognised the importance of actually learning the trade. For example, by undertaking further study, having a good mentor and knowing the importance of networking.

“That was very interesting, and really concreted in my mind the importance of HR certification and having a very clear idea of what good HR looks like.”

Hammond intends to draw on this research to contribute to her role on AHRI’s National Certification Council.

How can HR use data to measure its own impact?

As our world of work grows more data-centric, maintaining HR’s credibility will require tangible ways to measure its success, says Hammond. As the employment landscape has evolved over the past few decades, so has the way HR gauges its own effectiveness.

“HR has changed so much in terms of what we do and the way we frame things,” she says. 

“From my perspective, HR used to be run and led with a [focus on] homogeny. Now, it’s completely flipped to leading with business context and a focus on the individual employee experience. 

“From a workforce planning perspective, that’s really an opportunity to look at the data through that lens when we think about how we measure the impact of what we do, and how we know the plan is working. One of the key measures now has to be the engagement and commitment of people in your organisation. And that’s a big change.”

Since so much of HR’s efforts are concentrated on influencing others, another way to measure its efficacy is to assess whether managers feel confident leading their people, she says.

Hammond also stresses the value of professional certification to maintain the heightened credibility that HR has built up in recent years. A standardised qualification like this helps to cement the understanding that HR is a complex field that not ‘just anyone’ can enter. 

Undertaking further study can also help HR professionals approach their work with a more holistic understanding of the field of HR and the employment landscape. 

As Hammond puts it: “It’s not like a qualification gives you all that knowledge, but what it does is help you start to understand and develop critical thinking around the different aspects of the field.”

More importantly, qualifications that can measure and demonstrate HR’s effectiveness are the only sure-fire way to ensure quality and consistency in an organisation’s HR services.

“I got into this field and I’ve stayed in it because I really believe there’s some significant value we can create – and, with respect, harm if it’s not done well.” 

This article was originally published in the June 2023 edition of HRM Magazine.

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Ninety per cent of C-suite executives believe their companies pay attention to people’s needs when introducing new technology but only 53 per cent of their staff agree, says a new PwC report. The findings come from a survey of 12,000 people from all over the world (not including Australia) and tried to capture multiple generations, roles and industries.  

When it comes to workplace tech, it’s not just new technology where employees and leaders don’t line up. Ninety-two per cent of C-suite execs say they’re satisfied with the technology experience their company currently provides but only 68 percent of staff agree.

The report suggests this has to do with a lack of understanding on leadership’s part about the people that work for them. It says that more choice in their technology (from selecting which devices they use, to being able to choose voice over text) and more input in the initial selection of technology are their primary desires.

But perhaps the statistics can be partially explained by the sunk cost fallacy. If you’ve never heard of the concept, it’s essentially about human loss aversion. We’re loathe to part with what we own. In vain we will “sink” more value into it, rather than ditching it for something new. A commonly cited example of the behaviour is going to a concert you’ve bought tickets to, even if it’s the last thing you actually feel like doing. Your fear of wasting the value you’ve spent outweighs what would make you happier.

Referring to the report’s findings on current workplace technology, leaders could be experiencing the sunk cost fallacy. They have invested considerable resources into their platform, and are both financially and emotionally wedded to the current situation, so of course they will tell a survey they’re happy.

A disconnect

What the sunk cost fallacy doesn’t explain is why, when it comes to new technology, executives feel they’re paying attention to their people’s needs when almost half their staff disagree. Research from Gartner, presented by VP, team manager Clare Moncrieff at the ReimagineHR conference earlier this year, possibly provides an answer.

Gartner found that only 27 per cent of companies have a single strategy for digitalisation, meaning 73 per cent have a more piecemeal approach. The problem with this is that doing things piecemeal increases the amount of factors you might miss (see infographic below).

Gartner also found that 67 per cent of the questions business leaders ask about digitalization relate to digital technologies. In other words, they mostly think about products. This means they are missing everything else involved in a people-first digitalisation strategy.

A lot of the questions executives should be asking can be asked by HR, particularly when it comes to issues around skills, competencies and mindset. This becomes clear when you factor in the PwC finding that only half of staff and 64 per cent of managers are satisfied with the resources they have at their disposal to learn how to use new technology.

HR’s role in digitalisation

It’s always interesting when research firms reach the same conclusion. Both Gartner and PwC recommend that bringing staff along with any technology change is crucial. Gartner has the following ideas to make that happen.

• An overriding question HR should ask is when personalisation should come from people, and when it should come from computers. Would people prefer to ask a machine about their annual leave, but talk to a human when it comes to workplace complaints?
• One issue is a right to privacy. Obviously HR analytics are important but many people fear that if you track them, you will discover some employees can be made redundant. Gartner says that 41 per cent of employees don’t trust their employer to not use their own data against them. So they advise leaders to stop asking for data from staff, and start rewarding them for providing it – possibly even offering to purchase it.
• Similar to the privacy issue are employee concerns that they might “innovate themselves out of a job”. If staff do what you want and help the organisation with technological changes, will they so successfully streamline processes that you find you need fewer staff members?
• The question becomes how do you encourage employees to identify ways to automate their own work. One possibility: in February 2017, British insurance company Aviva asked their workforce of 16,000 “could a robot do your job?” They let employees know that anyone who answered “yes” would be retrained for a different role.

PwC suggest the following:

• Change people’s mindsets around what upskilling means. It shouldn’t be training in the typical coursework sense, but instead focus on lifelong learning.
• Take into account the overall work experience – new technologies will not change what motivates your employees.
• Don’t just use data analytics, a more personal approach is required to find out what people’s jobs are actually like.

Finally, both Gartner and PwC think it’s crucial to expand the number of people who have a say over technology changes. They suggest bringing in staff from all relevant departments, at all levels of seniority, and then seeking out your most firm critics and learning about their objections.

The post Is technology people-first? Leaders say yes, employees no appeared first on HRM online.

Financial reporting has not kept pace with changes in business. Today, businesses routinely report on environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks which aim to assist investors in understanding a listed company’s exposure and approach to mitigating these risks. However, this does not extend to risks related to intangibles, including an organisation’s people.

As evidence of this phenomenon, Standard & Poor’s found that in 1975, 83 per cent of value, as measured by market capitalisation, was captured on corporate balance sheets. Intangibles were far less important then.

That situation has changed. By 2015, the ‘off-balance sheet’ proportion of value, as measured by market capitalisation, the intangible assets – including the value of an organisation’s people in creating value – had grown to 87 per cent.

Investors want and need the critical information which integrated reporting (IR) is designed to provide about an organisation’s strategy, business model, governance, performance and prospects. But also, how people are aligned with the strategy. So how do investors and securities analysts get the information if it is not held in corporate reports? And what are the business productivity benefits that arise from adoption of IR?

First, let’s look at the reasons to do it. What IR offers is consistent understanding of the strategy and business model partly by breaking down organisational silos. An understanding of IR creates better strategic alignment and more effective and efficient reporting processes as well as improved internal reporting. GE and NAB, have achieved good practice in the ‘readability’ of their integrated reports, and have seen steep changes in employee engagement as a result.

The world’s largest investors are speaking up about IR. Larry Fink, CEO of investment management company BlackRock, is calling for more strategic reports from the companies in which it invests. CalPERS, an agency that manages pension and health benefits for the state of California, is calling for IR as a matter of good corporate governance. Widespread best practice and investor-led adoption is being achieved in the UK, South Africa, Japan, Brazil and Sri Lanka. Australia has fallen behind.

Challenge for the HR profession

People don’t only provide human capital to their organisation, they bring and build intellectual capital, and contribute to the delivery of an organisation’s ouputs (products and services). Employees contribute to the outcomes from the organisation’s activities in creating value in the longer  term for investors and other key stakeholders.

While some good material already exists in relation to measuring the contribution of an organisation’s people, much less guidance is available on how to report it.

David Ulrich, in his 2015 book, The Leadership Capital Index – Realising the Market Value of Leadership, analyses two broad domains: the individual domain (e.g. personal qualities, fit between the leader’s style and the organisation’s market promises) and the organisational domain (a leader’s ability to create customer-focused cultures). He details rigorous metrics and methods for evaluating leaders on each of these factors. But how to incorporate this data in integrated reports?

“Traditional financial [KPIs] aren’t much help when it comes to measuring the worth of, say, customer satisfaction or employee engagement. But by partnering with HR leaders, CFOs can identify workforce KPIs and, together, help drive the company’s differentiated strategy,” said Robert Landon from Oracle in his article posted on the Forbes website in March.

The next step is to determine how to incorporate such KPIs into integrated reports. A good way to start is by looking at following companies’ IR reporting.

What can HR do?

Integrated reporting, and the benefits of its successful adoption, bring great opportunities for the HR profession to make a significant strategic and commercial contribution.

In The Market

A number of challenges to widespread adoption of IR exist in Australia, including director liability for forward-looking and risk-oriented statements.

HR can assist by discussing the benefits to human capital management of effective integrated reporting with the directors of their organisations. Professionals may get directly involved by joining the Australian Business Reporting Leaders Forum.

Within Your Organisation

HR can participate in determining the metrics that matter to value creation (the strategy), the value creation process (business model and governance) and the six capitals, particularly human capital. Also HR can show how people contribute to the outcomes for the other capitals – for example, by using Ulrich’s Leadership Capital Index. They can then participate in developing the human capital aspects of the IR.

They can also contribute to improving remuneration reports, improving their link to strategy, the business model, governance and risk management.

For AHRI

A framework for reporting on human capital and intellectual capital is a missing link in corporate reporting, and the least developed in the IR Framework.

The World Intellectual Capital Initiative has done good work on developing intellectual capital reporting in the context of integrated reporting.  

An opportunity lies for AHRI, in partnership with industry bodies such as the AICD, to work with the International Integrated Reporting Council in building a simple human capital reporting framework, possibly working with the Maturity Institute, a body devoted to improving professionalism within organisations.

Michael Bray is director, better business reporting and Susan Ferrier is national managing partner, people, performance and culture both at KPMG Australia.

This feature originally appeared in the August 2017 edition of HRM magazine.

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Delving into a study conducted by her organisation, Jean Martin from Gartner (formerly CEB) explains that the HR analytics programs that worked were “uniquely focused on business impact and prescription for action.”

Going into more detail, she reveals “Rather than focusing on your people, you need to focus on what you as a business wants to accomplish in the next five years.”

Watch the video for more.

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Bias in data analytics can happen either because the humans collecting the data are biased or because the data collected is biased.

Being biased is a natural tendency that we all possess but it must be reduced as much as possible to make better decisions. Bias in data analytics can be avoided by framing the right questions, which allow respondents to answer without any external influences, and by constantly improving algorithms. Below you will find four types of biases and tips to avoid them.

1. Confirmation bias in data analytics

Confirmation bias occurs when researchers use respondents’ answers to confirm their original hypothesis; only accepting evidence that supports it and rejecting those responses that go against it. The problem with confirmation bias is that it supports only one viewpoint and out rightly rejects others, thus narrowing down the gaze of the company. To reduce confirmation bias, researchers must be ready to reexamine and reconsider respondents’ answers and must also avoid falling in love with preconceived notions and views.

2. Interpretation bias in data analytics

Interpretation bias is the human tendency to interpret ambiguous situations in a positive or negative fashion. One of the most common forms of this in organisations occurs when data is presented.

There’s a famous study about this. Elizabeth Loftus at the University of California carried out research in which she showed a film of car crashes to her volunteers. Then, she split them into groups and asked them to sit in separate rooms. Loftus asked them several questions about the car crashes, but used different verbs for each group. For instance, one of the questions asked was “about how fast were the cars going when they… contacted/hit/bumped/collided/smashed”. To her surprise, the choice of verb had a huge impact on their estimates (those who were told they “smashed” guessed higher speeds, as compared to those who were told they “contacted”).

So if you’re presenting data from an engagement survey to the leaders of your company, be aware of what words you’re using. For instance, spot the differences between these two statements.

1. Only 50 per cent of our remote workers reported finding their work very meaningful
2. A full 50 per cent of our remote workers reported finding their work very meaningful

The former presumes that 50 per cent is disappointing, the latter paints a rosier picture. To avoid this bias, it’s best to have a baseline data point to compare against, such as an industry average, or your own organisation’s past performance.

3. Information bias in data analytics

In 2008, Google came up with a novel task for early warning of flu to curb its proliferation. The initiative, called “Flu Trends”, collected search keywords being used by people in a region. If there were more searches regarding flu symptoms, effects or cures, then it would alert the local health authorities to take an action.

But the program failed to take into account changes Google made to its own search algorithm. In early 2012 Google made such an adjustment so that it suggested a diagnosis when people typed in symptoms (such as “cough”). Flu Trends didn’t know about this, so it alerted authorities to flu epidemics much larger than the reality turned out to be.

Bias in data analytics continues to be a major problem and steps should be taken to reduce it by developing advanced algorithms. Also, data scientists should not be biased while collecting and analyzing responses which favor their research. They should be open to all kinds of viewpoints that would ultimately help to take better decisions.

Naveen Joshi is Director at Allerin Tech, a Mumbai based software solutions provider. This article is an edited adaptation of a post on his LinkedIn page.

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In the age of disruption, one way to assess companies that are succeeding is to look at their marketing department’s strategy. The most successful ones are putting the customer at the centre of everything they do.

And HR needs to be more like them, says Simon Corcoran, former HR manager at PwC and co-CEO at HR consultancy A-HA! (A Human Agency).

“We talk a lot about the future of work in HR at the moment, and in my opinion the future of work is the employee experience.”

For the past 20 years, marketing professionals have argued that if you can figure out exactly what your customer wants, you can set up your strategy, brand, product and services to cater to that, he says. “You know who’s buying, who’s not buying and if they’re not buying, how do you get them.”

The same can be applied to the employees experience (EX) at work. “What you’re seeing with a lot of the bigger organisations and some smaller ones too is that if you can get your ‘customer experience’ right, you’ll see the results.”

“We can learn a lot from the path that marketing has paved”

Marketing and the customer experience are now an integral part of everyday businesses, because, over the last few decades, they’ve been able to prove their worth by showing the relationship between the customer and the organisation, says Corcoran. “And they absolutely have a seat at the table now because of it.”

“That whole experience about refining the customer journey through mapping, and understanding the value proposition has been a really credible and fantastic journey for organisations to experience,” he says. Most importantly, it’s given them a vision of how behaviour translates to commercial success.

Now he says it’s HR’s turn to create a compelling employee experience that clearly maps the relationship between employee and the organisation.

The employee-centric workplace

In order to decode the customer experience, the marketing profession has developed methodologies such as customer journey maps and personas connected to the sales cycle in order to understand the pathways different customers can take to make a sale. HR can adopt these same methodologies for employees, says Corcoran – to understand how their journey at an organisation fits with a business strategy. For example, “we can take take critical roles such as graduates, mid-level employees and senior executives and run personas through to understand; ‘what would the ideal experience be for this specific employee?’”

Another element Corcoran says is applicable from marketing is the concept of the “promoter”. In marketing this may refer to a high-spending customer, or customer who advocates for a brand to their peers. In HR a promoter is “a highly engaged employee.” At his own consultancy, tools that score and analyse the behaviours and feelings of highly engaged employees are able to identify what most inspires and motivates people in their day-to-day work – and how to share that with some of the less-inspired members of the business. “Once we know who they are, and why they love coming to work, we can harness that data.”

EX: creating a “bespoke” experience

Organisations can bring engagement and EX together by using data to design bespoke experiences “that really up the ante on delivering an exciting proposition to employees.”

“Data is king in the HR world,” says Corcoran. And while many HR professionals have access to big data, few are using it well. “Marrying a marketing-driven mindset about employee experience with data allow us to create hypotheses around what our EX is, and then test it to give a longitudinal view for the business,” say Corcoran.

“If we can use data to create history maps of a business, we’ll be able to look back over a period of time and be able to map out the historical footprint of the business. Too often we just look at the data for now; we need to look at the data over a period of time.”

The marketing mindset, he says, asks ‘how do we get better at understanding our employee experience, from how they create relationships at work, how they fit into the business strategy, and how they support and promote the company brand’.

“It has to come from data-driven insights that determine how companies can create compelling experiences for employees.”

Connect with HR’s brightest minds and most innovative ideas at Australia’s largest HR event – the AHRI National Convention and Exhibition in Sydney (21−23 August). Registration closes 11 August.

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As we see with companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, the blue chip corporates of old are being superseded by companies that continue to disrupt the traditional landscape. We’re seeing a world of accelerated change; sci-films such as Back to the Future seem positively quaint – and nobody doubts that any futuristic movie is not so much a fantasy as much as it is a soon-to-be reality. It’s true when it comes to HR software too. 

It’s also a landscape where the explosion of possibility about technology has coincided with an increased risk; we see the digital world elevate those primal human instincts of fear and mistrust.

The rise of cyber security comes with the rise of cyber hacking; the rise of bots with automation and loss of jobs; and artificial intelligence with fears about the limits of human consciousness.

In my work, I’m lucky to work with founders, CEO’s and HR experts and speak with them about  on how they plan to bring all the above elements of the high-tech workplace to their office, not with fear but with enthusiasm for the future.

As innovative companies provide new HR software that promises to completely transform the way the profession does everything; from day-to-day processes, to high level strategic planning, our challenge is how we navigate through the chatter – and make the right HR software decisions to benefit our organisations.

I suggest that to achieve this goal, we need to change how we approach buying HR software.

1. Ask: Who is the customer?

Firstly, we need to keep in mind the central tenet of what we do. In this case that the software is not in fact for us; it’s for our workforce. We are not the customer – the workforce is!

What do I mean by this?

Essentially, that we need to make decisions based on the nature of our workforce rather than what appeals to us as a user.

To make these kinds of decisions effectively, we need to bring the workforce into the decision-making process, including the line managers, sales,  IT etc.

2. Don’t buy what you don’t understand

The other aspect is that, to be frank, HR tend to be coming to HR software from a very low maturity curve.

For those of you using older technology in the market – those of you still on PeopleSoft, Payroll; I’m looking at you!

Newer isn’t necessarily better: you need to bring into the process the ‘users’ – your workforce.

Understand your workforce profile, their needs, wants and expectation of technology in general. Then incorporate in your business plan: where are you going as a company? What skills, markets, products does your people strategy need in order to enable this business plan to succeed?

3. Succeed to plan, plan to succeed

If you do not have these answers, you are not ready!

My #toptip is this: engage with your vendor’s early so that requirements are set, you have experts in the workforce on hand to produce the right business case, ask the right questions and facilitate the answers you need so you are ready.

In the new world of HR software, it’s not about a one-off purchase anymore that will serve you for years to come.

Now, you are buying into a service – ‘software as a service ‘(SaaS).

So the big change for you is to select the right software, that your workforce will adopt – and actually use efficiently and effectively.

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10: words NOT to use on your LinkedIn Profile

How do you get hired? Be an individual, not a statistic.

If the job description states they are looking for a passionate individual, conventional wisdom suggests you should state that you’re passionate on your online profile, right?

Wrong. LinkedIn’s annual ‘buzzwords’ study shows that the old writer’s adage: “show, don’t tell” also applies to penning a winning professional profile.

According to LinkedIn, Australians who are using buzzwords in an attempt to highlight their expertise may not realise that they are actually diluting their professional brand in the minds of recruiters. Each year, LinkedIn’s analysis of millions of profiles comes together to compile the ten worst offenders from the past twelve months.

2017’s overused words?

•         Specialised
•         Leadership
•         Passionate
•         Experienced
•         Strategic
•         Focused
•         Expert
•         Creative
•         Successful
•         Excellent

LinkedIn’s data also shows you only have five to ten seconds to impress a potential employer online, so it’s important to use authentic communication to stand out.

“You can’t always avoid using buzzwords,” says Shiva Kumar, LinkedIn Head of Communications Australia & New Zealand. “But if you do you need to substantiate what you say you are with evidence in your profile.” If you don’t, well, you’re just another of the eight million Australians on the platform saying the exact same thing.

Despite the fact that an algorithm sourced this buzzword data, Kumar maintains professional social networks like LinkedIn actually favours authenticity when it comes to recruitment. “In the end, it’s about people-to-people communication and recruiters are still looking to try to see through the hype to who you really are.”

6,200: Injured Australian and NZ workers

New findings from Safe Work Australia show that employee’s satisfaction with their employer’s return to work plan varies depending on the size of the organisation.

The 2016 Return to Work Survey spoke to nearly 6200 Australian and New Zealand injured workers from organisations ranging from small businesses to large organisations.

While those employed within a large business are are “more likely to feel supported than their small-business counterparts,” they are also “less likely to believe their workplace suggestions are taken seriously or their managers are committed to safety.”

Small-business respondents were also significantly more likely to have been “very involved” in the development of their return-to-work plan than medium-organisation workers (67% compared to 53%).

It also reveals that when it comes to employee support, we are being outdone by our South-Eastern neighbours.

The report says that 44 percent of injured workers in New Zealand were likely to say that returning to work when they did helped their recovery, as compared to 33 per cent in Australia (33%).

On the other hand a significantly greater proportion of injured workers in Australia (64%) stated that they had a return to work plan when compared with New Zealand (55%) and around six in ten reported that they were very involved in the development of the plan.

3: The unpaid hours you clock if you work from home

Working remotely may not be as advantageous as we think.

A new study out of the University of Iowa shows that working from home adds extra hours to the work week, but little additional pay.

Telecommuting has long been hailed as a boon for workers; giving employees the flexibility to work outside the office and improve work-life balance.

However these new findings may change workers’ perceptions of the value of telecommuting – or, could spur employers to better define the ‘work-at-home workday.’

The study was based on a long-running national survey of American workers with a standard 40-hour work week. It found that those who opted to work at least part of the time away from the office ended up working an average of three hours more per week, encroaching on home and family time.

The takeaway for HR? Employees need to track their time and keep their manager in the loop, says Mary Noonan, associate professor in sociology at the UI and co-author of the study.

For more surprising HR numbers, read our previous articles on game-driven recruitment and wearable workplace tech.

The post 3 fascinating HR numbers to know about this year appeared first on HRM online.

Last December, a games company located in a building tucked behind a Bunnings Warehouse in the sleepy Brisbane suburb of Stafford competed alongside military simulation developers, worldwide universities and professional game developers at the International Serious Showcase & Challenge in Orlando, Florida.

While they weren’t the victors, as they were at the Australasian event, they succeeded in attracting the largest crowds to their stand as people queued up to play Cognify, their latest pre-hire assessment game.

So, what drew this international audience in? Most impressive was the game’s simplicity and broad appeal as an effective and engaging way to reliably assess candidates for employment. And the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

“In the US, simulations and games are widely accepted as legitimate tools in the recruitment process. There’s a lot of comfort with the concept of ‘serious games,'” says Revelian CEO, Cherie Curtis.

Tell me more about game-based recruitment

Cognify is Revelian’s latest game-based psychometric assessment that uses game-based design thinking, backed by psychometric science, to provide candidates and employers with what they consider a vastly improved assessment experience. 

One of the new wave of assessment tools, games like Cognify are gradually replacing more traditional psychometric tests as a better way of objectively assessing critical skills and attributes. And increasingly, they’re being adopted by leading employers in Australia and internationally.

Are games really a good way to assess candidates?

And do they actually give you the information you need to make better hires? Here are 6 reasons why they could help your recruitment process.

1. Properly constructed games are based on psychometric science and reputable models of human intelligence

While games are fun, most of them don’t have any bearing on how someone is going to perform on the job.

Recruitment games assess proven indicators of future work performance, such as general mental ability (GMA) and the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model of intelligence. Combined, they give you a clear and objective indicator of each candidate’s problem-solving, information processing speed, numerical reasoning skills, verbal knowledge and other performance-related attributes.

2. They’re relevant for all roles

While some of the games in the marketplace today are clearly more suited to graduate and entry-level recruitment, games such as Cognify represents a new breed of more sophisticated and clean game design that appeals to a much broader audience.

Similar in appearance to some of the better ‘brain-training’ games, it also offers high face validity: candidates can see how the skills measured are relevant to the job. Further, the abilities assessed are important for every role, from entry-level admin to senior management.

3. They enhance the candidate experience, which promotes your employer brand

Increasingly, organisations are realising the importance of optimising a candidate’s journey through their recruitment process. With 80 per cent of candidates recommending game-based assessment, it’s clear that today’s digital natives prefer a more technically rich, immersive recruitment experience.

“Candidates forget they’re completing an assessment, which means they’re less stressed, and you get more authentic data about their performance, as well as promoting your brand as an innovator,” explains Curtis.

4. They’re hard to ‘fake’

A common problem with traditional assessment methods – and indeed much of the recruitment process – is the candidate’s (understandable) desire to present themselves in the very best possible light. Games make it more difficult for candidates to distort their responses, which gives employers a more robust and accurate appraisal of their suitability for a role.

As Jason Blaik, Head of Psychology at Revelian puts it, “Games like Cognify assess ability and aptitude without exposing the nature of the construct being assessed. They offer a unique candidate experience each time the game is played, while delivering an equal level of difficulty to ensure a fair comparison”.

5. They provide a more complete assessment of each candidate

Another way games supersede traditional assessment methods is in the amount of data collected for each candidate. While other assessments record a right or wrong answer, games record and analyse every aspect of gameplay and potentially thousands of data points. This means that you can get a better understanding of how each candidate approached different problems and situations and arrived at their solutions, to give you more sophisticated insights into each person.

6. They’re applicable across all ages, genders, ethnicities and backgrounds

Forget the stereotype of the 18-year-old male playing games in his parent’s basement: the most recent stats show that the average game player is 33 and almost as likely to be female as male. They’re also spread out across the world, with nearly 50% of players coming from the Asia-Pacific region, followed by the US and Europe.

However, even if a person plays games every day, Revelian’s research shows that this doesn’t impact their performance. As Jason Blaik tells us, “We analysed the data from game-players and non-gamers very carefully. And, as we’d hoped, because our games offer each candidate a unique experience, a person’s previous level of familiarity with computer games had little impact on their performance.”

Internationally and in Australia, gamification is emerging as a tool for workplace activities beyond the hiring room. Australian-based digital platform Wooboard allows employees to receive a “Woo!” from their peers whenever they reach team or individual goals. And in the US, companies such as Badgeville and CaptainUp are used for recruitment by the likes of Wells Fargo, Dell and Hewlett Packard.

The post Could games give your recruitment an edge in a competitive market? appeared first on HRM online.