For many years, it was said that Mercedes Benz, as a car manufacturer, was way ahead of their competition, because they understood the power of innovation and technology, and had a strong R&D to deploy more secure, comfortable everyday cars.
Today, many other manufacturers, including Tesla, Toyota, Mazda, Ford, Vw are investing heavily in innovating their cars for their buyers.
The same trend has happened in People Analytics, the HR statistics function, in charge with collecting employee data (all sorts of data, from age, gender, location, function, performance, engagement etc)
crafting metrics relevant to the business
analysis defining relationships, trends
to insights, thus the business to be able to take appropriate
action, in the form of policies, rules, programs
10 – 15 years ago, when data become from valuable resource, to a driver of business decisions, being that it started to become easier to store and analyze, only a handful of companies were capable and keen to use it to drive change in their organization.
Today, the trend of leveraging data for performance management and staff engagement became such a popular thing, that there are more and more companies leaving behind the old way of taking people decision based on gut feeling, and are looking to data and data analysts to show where they experience issues. A few examples are in attrition rate, engagement, performance.
There’s one big challenge though, what data we measure, how do we reflect, interpret and make business and people decisions, that are not biased, are ethically correct and can actually impact change for the better of all.