It’s time to accept this trend is here to stay
We caught up with David Green, founder of Zandel and former global director, people analytics, at IBM, at our recent HR Tech Summit in Toronto.
In amongst the techy throng, Green shared his thoughts on the future of HR and explained what he was most looking forward to hearing about at the Summit.
“Firstly, it really was a great program of speakers,” he told HRD Canada. “The HR space is changing so dramatically at the moment, there’s so much new technology coming in. But out of all of it, what excites me the most are those products coming in for employees that help personalize learning recommendations and internal opportunities within companies – tools which support employers with recruiting.
“That combination of technology underpinned with data analytics to really helps improve the employee experience, whilst also helping the organization hire and develop better people.”
We picked Green’s brains over what trends he thinks are coming to the fore in the next few years – and his answer was rather decisive.
“People analytics. In Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report it was joint number one. It’s been lingering around 7th or 8th for the past few years, but what we’ve started to see is a real move from interest to adoption. This has been driven by a number of things; increased employee expectations around personalization, business needs and industrial transformation.”
People analytics was a hot topic at our event, and one of Green’s specialist subjects. And though it seems as if it’s a trend that will only continue to grow, we wanted to know how HR leaders can measure the ROI on this data.
“You have to start working on the right business problems, the challenges that will have a huge impact on the company, and then measure that impact,” Green explained.
“There are so many companies out there that invest in people analytics, get the insights, and then forget to measure the actual impact. It’s important to tie analytics to business performance – the challenge with HR is looking to see if this alone has a direct impact or there’ve been other factors at play. You need to be very specific on what you’re focusing on and what you’re trying to impact upon.”
