Questions that appear simple to the person asking them can be messy to an analytics pro who has to answer them. One nasty form of messiness is changes to … Read more
Managing Unrealistic HR Analytics Turnarounds
Imagine that a leader asks the people analytics team, “Where are we having the most turnover, and why is it happening?” A diligent analytics professional … Read more
Are Graph Databases the Next Big Thing in HR Analytics?
Most databases have data arranged in rows and columns, much like a spreadsheet. That is what we usually have in mind when we start to do analysis. However, … Read more
Managers Don’t Know What Strategic HR Support They Need
Anyone building an HR dashboard is faced with the problem of what data to put in it. A seemingly reasonable approach is to start by asking managers what … Read more
The Quiet Value of HR Data Standards
Data standards may seem to be among the dullest topics in the world of HR tech. Yet, the quiet work to build and implement standards has a payoff that … Read more
Tread Carefully With Pay Equity Analysis
As an HR professional, you may be asked to do a pay equity analysis. Unlike most other analyses you will do, this area is fraught with risks. Consequently, … Read more
3 Types of HR Analytics Projects to Avoid
When HR analytics was new, analytics teams would search around for something useful to do. Once those teams became established, however, everything flipped … Read more
When HR Resists the Employee Monitoring Tech That Managers Want
Managers used to be able to monitor employees by literally keeping an eye on them. Whether this really was an effective way to judge performance, the fact … Read more
Most Hierarchies Fail to Support Frontline Workers
Over the last year, there has been plenty of conversation about frontline workers as critical but often under-appreciated resources for organizations. The … Read more
Why Are There No Good HR Scorecards?
A distribution-center manager can sit down at the end of a quarter and look at a scorecard to see how well the location has done. A few metrics on cost, … Read more
Don’t Rely on HR Analytics to Tell a Story
Analytics is all about aggregates. We look at the behavior of many employees and summarize it in single numbers such as “cases of misconduct,” “average … Read more
Can Humans Outperform AI in Knowledge Work?
We all know that artificial intelligence is a powerful thinking machine, which makes us all concerned about whether AI will take knowledge work away from … Read more
Moving From Predictive to Pervasive Analytics
Most maturity models for people analytics implicitly assume that the goal is ever-increasing mathematical sophistication. I’ve argued that mathematical … Read more
Happening on ERE: How to Use Diversity Hiring Metrics
Yeah, yeah, we know your organization cares about diversity hiring. But what does that actually mean? Nothing unless you translate it into action. And … Read more
The Thin Line Between Oversight and Surveillance
With almost half of the labor force working from home, many workers have finally been able to experience the flexibility they have long craved. As a … Read more
What an Analytics Maturity Curve Should Actually Look Like
Many people have seen analytics maturity curves. Most look the same — which is too bad because they take us in the wrong direction. They tend to look … Read more
Don’t Read This Article and Get Back to Work!
Not long ago, I sat down to write a blog post about facetime vs. Facetime. The premise was that, in the course of the last year, the meaning of “facetime” … Read more
If You’re Having Trouble Integrating HR Data (and Who Isn’t?)…
HR leaders have for some time now been aware of the challenges of integrating data between different HR systems. Meanwhile, it’s still surprisingly common … Read more
How to Make Your Turnover Data Actionable
We may not often turn to economists to help us think differently about decisions we make about people, but I believe there are lessons to be learned. … Read more
Balancing Confidence and Uncertainty in Analytics
There’s much that people analytics professionals can learn from how data has been used in the pandemic. One of the most noticeable aspects of the expert … Read more