Top tips for HR professionals to improve workforce reporting
Start with the question:
Outside of mandatory or ‘hygiene factor’ reporting, people reporting should not be a goal in itself. It needs to answer a broader question to add value. Think of the role of reporting as a way to stimulate debate on people matters among the executive committee or at board level. What are the people issues that sit behind the business issues that the wider executive team or board are interested in?
Think "less data, more narrative":
In the words of one HR leader, the profession needs to “be better than the flat stats”. Narrative is what allows for action and a full systems-thinking approach to people data. Think about the interconnectedness of most areas of people management and development. The data might not always tell the whole story – for example, absenteeism figures reducing could be seen as a positive until you realise that issues related to stress and presenteeism, such as conflict, have increased.
Consider how the information helps achieve your organisational goals:
Information to senior management and the board must demonstrate clearly how the people strategy and approach helps to achieve the broader organisational priorities.
Think about how to translate people information into commercial impact and business outcomes:
Often the easiest data to gather covers the baseline (or hygiene) factors, but the work of the HR leadership team is to turn elements into a commercial conversation, connected to business performance and predictability.
For example, look at the cost per employee or the financial impact of attrition compared with recruitment costs. Can you demonstrate the cost per employee of turnover through the time and cost of recruitment, the loss of productivity through absence and the cost of onboarding and training? Turning people information into cash impact can help drive investment in employee initiatives that will promote retention and elevate the whole discussion.
Educate and challenge other leaders on people insight:
This might be guiding them to think about what matters when, linking people matters to long-term strategy and organisational success or failure (for instance, the risk of not having enough skills in the right area), and advising on how to interpret and analyse people data.
Avoid creating ‘busy work’ around data if it doesn’t produce actionable insights for the business:
Think about creating a case for the data that matters and where to focus efforts, especially if you are resource-poor. The HR leader should be the curator of people data. Collecting the right data is a routine process: it is choosing what to elevate to leadership and board level that requires accountability and the most focus. Facilitate discussions with stakeholders about the people information they would find most useful for decision-making.
Be clear on why you are collecting the data – and transparent about the story it tells:
Don’t fall into the trap of ‘slicing and dicing’ to explain something away for senior stakeholders. Instead, use the data to better understand the issue and address it. Data should not be used only to tell the story we want it to.
Bring in external context and benchmarking data:
The state of the labour market nationally and locally will often be material to conversations about both the business and the workforce. Board members want to know how things are comparable. How does this compare with what is happening in the market? What is the right number or scale for your organisation by comparison? The comparator is often what makes data meaningful.
Challenge ‘data-obsessed’ executives where appropriate:
Just because you can measure something doesn’t always necessarily mean you should. If you have a problem, it is unlikely to be solved by another dashboard. Instead, get to the heart of the issue that needs to be solved, and then think what data is needed to solve it. Always ask: “What will we do with that information?”
Use information to enable HR to initiate conversations about the trade-offs in the business:
Can it be used to debunk organisational myths? For example, can analysing data around a problem help other leaders to see how the problem they thought they had is actually something different and therefore requires a different solution?
Be aware that people data usually only has to be “accurate enough”:
It is not as black and white as financial data, so only needs to be accurate enough to build a compelling narrative around it.
Don’t get overwhelmed
With so much talk in the media and on conference stages around AI, it can feel difficult to even start, particularly with a small team and limited resources. However, sometimes it’s the little things that can make a big difference. One successful demonstration of the impact of looking at people data can provide leverage for more investment in the HR systems to enable further reporting.