I’ve been in the Data Analytics space for a long time and over the years I’ve worked on numerous HR “reporting, dash-boarding, and data warehouse projects.”  Actually,  I am in the process of wrapping up a 6 month project that integrates analytics into a Workday environment.

Just to level set, Workday, is highly regarded as a disruptive Cloud based technology for HR management and record keeping.  What I find valuable is that Workday opens the door to fresh thinking about analytics and its potential to impact HR.

Obviously, hiring, developing, and retaining great employees is a core imperative of all businesses.  However, that imperative deserves to be systematically measured and improved. Now more than ever the ability to provide great analytics is making that possible.  In fact, when HR analytics are done right, you really impact the value of your organization’s most valuable asset: the employees.  The insight provided by well-designed analytics makes you smarter about how to retain your top performers It also provides deeper understanding about how to best develop more workers into top performers.

Workday comes with sophisticated tools that allow a you to build custom operational reports and interactive dashboards that address classic HR metrics such as open headcount, absenteeism, promotions, demographics, and more.  While this is interesting, it is not game changing analytics.   This is table stakes.

Ultimately, you truly need to understand the employee journey within the organization from recruitment through the various stages of professional advancement, contribution opportunities, and recognition.  Money is always important and intersects with this lifecycle, but it is often not the most important factor for employee satisfaction.  Only when you fully understand the employee  journey and how you can positively intervene, will you dramatically improve organizational success.

It is also important to remember that HR data is only a partial picture of the employee.  You must consider information that helps “tell the story” of what the employee is doing, where they spend their time and with whom they interact.  Examples of this include time and attendance data, calendar and appointment data, etc.  Even workplace visit patterns that are obtained from card swipes can yield tremendous insight into the world of an employee.  Combine that with external data sources, such as survey data from Glassdoor, for example, could provide powerful input into your organizational health index.

At CTI, we’ve been building analytics solutions that integrate with Workday and focus on the “bigger” picture of the employee journey.  In my next blog, I will discuss Workday in more details and how I approached the analytic solutions to run alongside this platform that solve specific HR business challenges.

 

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