Augmented Intelligence in Human Resources

Data-driven decision-making is becoming standard practice in most organizations for operations, customer care, and marketing functions. Data analytics tools like Signals help businesses gain value from their data sources with augmented intelligence, providing insights to large volumes of data. Applying augmented intelligence to Human Resources (HR) data can provide great dividends in how we attract, retain, grow, and motivate the people in our organizations. A data analytics platform can be used to improve the performance of an organization, attract the best people, improve retention, and improve productivity.

HR sits on a large data lake, much of it in textual form including:

• Interview notes/transcriptions
• Employee profiles and resumes
• Performance evaluations
• Employee surveys (see related blog post: Text Analytics on Survey Data)
• Exit Interviews

HR leaders are starting to recognize that data-driven insights can have a major impact on their work, reducing corporate risk of having the wrong person in a position, and being successful in talent management and organizational performance. Data analytics can be used on HR data silos to answer questions such as:

• How do you select the job applicants most likely to succeed?
• Which employees are at risk of leaving the organization, and why?
• Which managers are not being effective? Why? What are the recommended action steps to improve?
• What elements of corporate environment has the greatest impact on employee engagement?
• Where is the corporate culture strongest, and why?

Image credit: situationalcommunication.com.

Leading companies recognize the value of the data held within the HR data silos, and are moving forward with data analytics solutions. (See related blog post: Bringing Data Silos Together) Let’s look at specific areas where HR data analytics produces a strong Return on Investment (ROI):

Sales

What if every new sales hire were successful in hitting their quota? Augmented intelligence enables you to analyze the profiles of your most successful salespeople and identify the common themes and attributes of their background. You may find that there are more important success factors than commonly used criteria like their GPA in college, or where they went to college. A sales person’s personal network, and their time spent with customers, may have more of an impact than the amount of training or year of experience. You can also analyze the profiles of low/poor performing employees, see common themes and traits, and improve your interview processes to weed out these candidates.

Employee Productivity

Do your employees spend most of their time in meetings and on email? IT and HR departments are now performing text analytics on email metadata to understand productivity differences among employees. Reducing the number of internal meetings is often a way to improve output. A text analytics tool like Signals makes quick work of email analysis (see related blog post: Analysis of Hillary Clinton Emails). You can also analyze sales data for a region or a store with email activity, the profiles of the managers, absentee data, etc. and see if there are common themes that explain the productivity differences across different areas of the business.

Retention

Using augmented intelligence tools, a company may examine the profiles, performance feedback, survey results, and other data to determine common themes in employee departures. Applying this insight to the current employee population may identify “high flight risk” employees currently on staff, as well as those in the interview pipeline. As companies implement beacon and smart badge technology within the office, you can analyze the data for open cubicle areas, large shared offices, private offices, cafeteria, and other locations. Some studies have shown that more light, and areas that encourage employee collaboration, result in higher retention and productivity. By looking at patterns in the HR data you can create action plans to improve retention of your most valued employees, and ensure that the interview process selects those most likely to stay.

HR is sitting on a wealth of data waiting to be explored. Employee survey data is a great source of solicited information, and combined with interaction data (emails, interview notes, etc.) and unsolicited data (social media posts, Glassdoor entries, etc.) HR can uncover the ‘why’ behind the data. Of course, the data and the insights is only part of the solution. Action plans need to be implemented to take advantage of the findings and to achieve the required ROI and business value.
When HR can demonstrate the ROI from an investment in analytics, they are more likely to receive additional budget money to expand the tools. The success of analytics in HR can described as measuring the value of people to an organization. Analytics is a key to unlocking the value in the data. HR leaders will be better equipped to attract, retain, and inspire talented people, leading to improved business results.

If you would like to try the Signals data analytics platform on your HR data, ask for a free trial account at clientsupport@stratifyd.com. We’d love to work with you!