In the current economic environment with organisations focusing on cutting costs, increasing efficiency and short-term survival it might not seem the ideal moment for HR to start talking to senior managers about fancy strategic stuff like HCM, evidence-based HR, analytics. In other words, the sort of thing that Alan Sugar would dismiss as "blue sky thinking"(image from freefoto.com).
But the downturn could be an opportunity for HR to use data more persuasively, according to Nick Kemsley, who is co-director of the Centre for HR Excellence at Henley Business School. In an article in Personnel Today Kemsley argues that the downturn offers HR an opportunity to emonstrate its value proposition. As well as advising on collective redundancy consultation or TUPE, HR people can help steer their organisations through the next few rocky months/years by advising top managers about how to balance the goal of growth in the longer term with stringent cost management in the sort term. Kemsley has his own term for this, "tactegic", as he explains here:
"In the "tact-tegic" offer, organisations need to focus on shorter-term activities, but in a longer-term context, and put increased value on getting the basics right in areas such as resourcing, payroll and employee relations, as a foundation for moving forward. Recent work by the HR centre [at Henley] shows that a large proportion of HR's business customers worry that the function is too keen to play at strategy when the "engine room" is not working as it should. Key to adding value at this difficult time is making better use of data to bridge the gap between shorter-term operational and longer-term strategic issues."Better leveraging of data in this way means gathering new kinds of data that are more focused around this business need, and making more of the data we already have so as to provide more relevant intelligence. This means that HR's approach to data must be re-balanced in three ways:
1. HR must become more comfortable using less precise macro-level or trend data to connect future organisational demand to current day operational supply.
2. HR must increase its use of data relating to business impact as opposed to process operation.
3. HR must use data to provide insight rather than just information.
Click through to the original article now to see a more detailed explanation of
these three points.
Kemsley's article is just the first in a series of expert resources which will be published on Personnel Today over the rest of 2012. The next article in the series is by another former HR director and expert and will look at what kind of data HR practitioners can put to use. Mayo is the author of a new book "Human Resources or Human Capital".
These articles will cover everything from basic issues to the elusive 'value-added' methods that provide statistical and financial proof that HR is not just about cutting costs but can contribute to revenue and profit growth.
On the basic level experts in the field will explain how to avoid common mistakes when using averages, for example, explain where HR can get its data from and how to make sense of Employee Opinion Survey data and act on it. At the other end of the spectrum the articles will show how you can demonstrate a cause and effect between an HR intervention and its impact on the bottom line.
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