Employers that neglect data miss opportunity to future proof organisation
“A workforce tsunami is approaching,” warned experts from HR consultancy Mercer, at the HR Directors Business Summit in Birmingham this week.
Speaking at the summit, they emphasised the key role HR analytics has to play in the future of work.
Citing their own research Charlotte Harding, human capital project manager at Mercer and the World Economic Forum, and Julia Howes, a principal at Mercer, said HR would have to get better at handling data to prepare for an increasingly disjointed workforce.
“We know that the future workforce will be highly fragmented, but we don’t know what capacity this workforce will work in, or in what direction organisations will go,” said Harding.
She said that analysing people data would help employers focus on the roles and skills needed in future, and should form part of every HR professional’s strategic workforce planning.
According to the pair’s research, 64 per cent of employers currently use agency workers to provide “short term access to key strategic skills” rather than developing their existing talent.
While they acknowledged the merits of both training and promoting internally, and buying in talent at specific levels of the organisation, Howes said employers would be wise to map out the current workforce to discover if and where talent bottlenecks were occurring.
“Do you have a build or buy workforce culture?” Howes asked delegates. “Some areas of the organisation, for example, would benefit from an outside perspective,” she said, highlighting the practice of organisational secondments between the public and private sector.
“You also have to ask ‘do we have sufficient movement of people?’” Howes said.
A workforce map of the organisation and key locations and divisions would also help to identify the flow of people and the key focal points of entry and exit.
Current HR information systems (HRIS) largely ignore the “total workforce” the consultants said, which means performance and costs cannot be monitored and staff development and productivity suffer as a result.
Harding said workforce analytics could help build the links between HR programmes and business strategy to ensure that initiatives are having the desired impact.
“It is vital that HR is aligned with company growth,” she added.
Mercer research shows that 90 per cent of the data in the world today had been created in the past two years alone. The fact that 88 per cent of larger companies are already reporting an IT shortage means organisations are failing to keep up with the rapidly changing market.
“A lot of it boils down to us not be ready for the shift,” said Howes.
“It is no secret that many jobs could be replaced by robots – termed ‘robo-sourcing’ – but we as a society are not yet ready to have robot surgeons operating on us,” Harding said.