How these HR leaders are using data to sharpen decisions and credibility

Two senior people leaders say HR can no longer afford to operate on intuition alone, with data and analytics fast becoming the backbone of decision-making and influence at the executive table.

At health and support service provider Each, executive director of people and culture Natacha Razavi has spent the past decade shifting the organisation from what she calls “roller doors down” whenever data was mentioned to a culture where every significant decision in her function is grounded in evidence.

Meanwhile, at Australian Payments Plus, chief people and culture officer Steve Reid described a similar evolution. The business always had plenty of data, but not enough insight. The focus now is on turning numbers into meaningful signals about retention, wellbeing and productivity – and ultimately, into targeted action.

Taken together, their experiences provide a practical, real-world roadmap for HR leaders looking to use data and analytics to drive better outcomes in their own organisations.

Each: Building a dedicated HR analytics engine inside a complex, purpose-driven business

Each operates at the complex end of community health. The organisation delivers a wide range of allied health and community services, from GPs and dental clinics to speech pathology, podiatry, early childhood intervention, mental health and older adult programs such as home care support and community activities.

Around 1,400 employees, 150 volunteers and a growing number of students support some of the most vulnerable people in the community, funded through multiple, shifting revenue streams rather than private income.

That volatility makes workforce decisions especially high stakes. When Razavi joined ten years ago, however, discussions about data were far less common than today.

Her background in transport and manufacturing meant she was used to environments where data routinely informed decisions, tracked trends and underpinned business cases. At Each, she had to build that culture almost from scratch.

A pivotal moment came about three years ago when she secured approval to implement a new HRIS. Rather than treating it as a simple system upgrade, she used the opportunity to reshape the function.

Alongside the technology business case, she pushed through a proposal for a new role: a manager of systems and data analytics embedded within the people and culture team. Her rationale was that she could not, from the executive chair, be both strategist and data analyst.

The function needed a dedicated capability that could build reports, dissect engagement results and translate people metrics into insights leaders could readily use.

Razavi  noted that there was a clear “light bulb moment” late last year. Once leaders began to see the dashboards, reports and trend analyses coming out of her team, they understood why a specialist analytics function belonged inside people and culture, rather than scattered across IT or finance.

Today, data touches almost every aspect of her remit. Engagement results are no longer a one-off survey event; they are carefully sliced and examined to reveal what is happening in specific teams and cohorts.

Basic measures such as annual leave have become strategic levers. By tracking who is not taking leave and where balances are becoming excessive, Razavi’s team highlights not just a wellbeing risk but a significant financial liability for a grant-funded organisation.

Compliance data is another critical strand. In a health setting, the validity and history of Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) registrations, along with a variety of mandatory checks, go directly to client safety and organisational risk. Being able to see where those exposures sit changes the tone of conversations with clinical leaders and the board.

Crucially, Razavi insists that business cases for new products, services or workforce changes are now driven by data. When a manager argues that they do not have the funds to adjust rosters or add headcount, her HR business partners are expected to bring hard numbers to the table.

For example, the actual overtime, penalty and shift allowance spend over the past 12 months attached to the current rostering model. Those numbers often reveal that smarter workforce design can be cost-neutral or even cost-positive, while improving service coverage and reducing burnout.

For Razavi, this is about more than operational fixes. She believes that using data helps HR practitioners lift their gaze from traditional, process-based work and develop deeper business acumen. It forces them to understand how people metrics connect to financial performance, risk and strategy rather than arguing on intuition or anecdote.

Australian Payments Plus: Turning workforce data into foresight rather than hindsight

If Each represents a decade-long transformation, Australian Payments Plus offers a snapshot of a younger analytics journey inside a rapidly changing organisation.

The company was formed four years ago when BPAY, eftpos and the New Payments Platform were brought together, along with a digital wallet business and a major digital identity service.

As a member-owned business providing critical payments and identity infrastructure to banks and large merchants, it has grown quickly. Reid noted that about 80% of current employees joined after the merger, meaning the company is dealing with a scaling workforce and relatively low average tenure.

From a people and culture perspective, Reid says the organisation started with plenty of raw data but limited clarity about what mattered most. The early work has been about deciding which questions to prioritise and what insight the business actually needs from the numbers. Only then could the team design dashboards and reporting rhythms that add value instead of noise.

Australian Payments Plus now produces regular dashboards and conducts quarterly deep dives into its people data. Rather than simply checking current turnover, leave or survey scores, the team looks for patterns over time.

Where they see changes in areas such as personal leave, turnover in specific teams, or shifts in certain survey questions, they deliberately connect those movements to concrete events like restructures or leadership changes. Alongside the quantitative metrics, they rely on qualitative inputs from exit surveys and interviews to provide colour and context.

Retention has been a particular focus, but Reid is careful to frame it properly. He sees turnover as a lagging indicator: by the time people are leaving, the underlying issues have usually been present for months or years.

Used in isolation, turnover data can easily prompt overreaction. At one stage, regretful turnover sat below 3%, a level he describes as artificially low. With the business now plateauing in size and tenure increasing, he and his team anticipated that career development would become far more important and that some uplift in regretful turnover would be both natural and explainable.

When the rate did rise, they did not treat it as a crisis. Instead, they read it against their earlier predictions. Because it aligned broadly with their forecast, it was a signal to accelerate career development initiatives, not a reason to panic about cultural collapse. Reid is clear, however, that if the rate were to double again over the next year or so, that would cross a line and demand a more serious intervention.

This ability to predict and then explain movement in key metrics is at the heart of Australian Payments Plus’ emerging analytics capability. The organisation does not want to wait until people have left en masse to ask what went wrong. It wants to use data to anticipate when issues like stagnating growth opportunities or rising stress might translate into exits, and to act before the damage is done.

Lead and lag indicators: Finding measures that really matter

To do that, Australian Payments Plus has had to build a balanced view of lead and lag indicators. Turnover and retention are treated as outcome measures – objective, non‑gameable reflections of whether people ultimately choose to stay. Alongside those, the company tracks three predictive areas through employee surveys: engagement, wellbeing and productivity.

Reid is especially thoughtful about how survey data can be distorted. In some organisations, engagement scores are tied directly to short-term incentive outcomes, meaning poor results can reduce bonuses.

In those situations, he argues, people are naturally more likely to respond in a way that protects their pay, and managers might engage in last-minute, superficial gestures to encourage favourable responses.

To avoid this, Australian Payments Plus does not link survey results to remuneration decisions, and it uses carefully worded questions that target the organisation’s impact rather than generic sentiment. One example is a wellbeing item that asks employees whether Australian Payments Plus has a positive impact on their wellbeing overall, a much more specific lens than a vague question about how they feel in life.

The aim is to create a suite of measures that employees cannot easily “game” and that genuinely reflect how the organisation is performing. When wellbeing or productivity scores dip in a particular area, the team treats this as an early warning sign.

They then look at how and when that might flow through to lagging indicators like turnover, and what actions could interrupt that pipeline – for example, changing workloads, addressing leadership issues, or investing in development.

Reid’s broader message is that HR teams must be disciplined and selective. Chasing every interesting number can lead to false patterns built on tiny samples or noise. Focusing on a small number of well-chosen metrics and then being willing to “pull on the threads” when something looks off, is far more powerful.

From intuition to influence: What other HR leaders can take away

Both leaders are keenly aware that many HR professionals still feel uncertain about where to begin with data and analytics. Razavi spoke about people who still gloss over the numbers or rely heavily on intuition. Yet in her experience, the more HR can speak the language of data, the more credible and influential it becomes.

Her first piece of advice is to start small and master the basics. Annual leave, turnover and simple trend lines can reveal far more than many practitioners assume. Getting comfortable with those fundamentals is a realistic first step for HR teams that do not have sophisticated tools or large analytics teams.

She is also emphatic about the value of building a strong relationship with finance. Workforce planning is where HR and finance intersect most tangibly, and understanding financial data – from labour costs to leave liabilities – accelerates HR’s ability to make and defend robust recommendations.

Reid’s guidance is similar. He encourages HR leaders to be explicit about what they want to know before diving into the data. Clarity of questions prevents teams from drowning in dashboards that are visually impressive but practically empty.

He also emphasised the importance of exploring anomalies with curiosity rather than immediately assuming crisis. Where a metric looks unusual, he advises tracing back what else has changed in that part of the business and using qualitative feedback to test hypotheses.

Both leaders stress that analytics is not about turning HR into a team of statisticians. It is about expanding HR’s line of sight across the organisation, challenging assumptions with evidence, and directing scarce time and resources to the actions that will genuinely move the dial.

For Razavi, that means HR business partners walking into conversations with operational managers armed with real numbers, not just instincts. For Reid, it is the ability to tell a coherent story over time about why metrics are moving and what that implies for the next 12 to 18 months.

What unites their perspectives is a belief that data and analytics, used well, enhance rather than diminish the human element of HR. By understanding trends earlier, HR can intervene more thoughtfully on issues like workload, wellbeing, leadership quality and career growth – all of which shape the day-to-day experience of employees.

In both a community health provider and a national payments utility, that makes the difference between reacting to problems after they explode and quietly solving them before they do.