A report by Thomsons has found that 70 per cent of organisations surveyed have upskilled existing HR team members to develop people analytics teams, while 23 per cent have hired in external talent.
The research shows that a further 22 per cent of employers plan to upskill HR team members over the next 12 months.
Employers are looking to collect employees data from a growing number of sources, including wearables and building sensors, in a bid to create better employee propositions for their people.
The survey of 60 HR decision makers found 87 per cent currently use or plan to use employee data to report on business operations and performance. Of those that have done so, 44 per cent have used people data insights to improve employee engagement, 31 per cent have improved employee productivity and 62 per cent have improved their benefits programme by looking at employees’ interactions with their benefits platform.
Almost 40 per cent of employers aren’t using people analytics to report on benefits take-up, radically diminishing their ability to accurately gauge return on investment.
Among those global organisations not using or planning to use employee data to report on business operations, 31 per cent cite a lack of data literacy in the HR function as the primary barrier, with an identical proportion citing poor-quality data.
Currently, 62 per cent of the sample collect employee benefits data on benefits take-up and scheme engagement, but this figure is set to rise to 96 per cent in the next three years. 21 per cent of companies collect data generated from building sensors, on employees’ footfall or desk time, but 50 per cent are likely to do this by 2022, according to the research.
When it comes to wearables, only 7 per cent of global employers collect data from these, but is predicted to rise to 43 per cent within three years.
Thomsons VP client solutions Matthew Jackson says: “There’s a common misconception that digitalisation and increasing automation will lead to job losses. Our research indicates that when it comes to HR, this simply isn’t the case – at least not in the near to mid-term. Instead, we will see an evolution of skills as businesses increasingly look to HR teams to supply data-based insights that can play a real role in measuring and informing people strategy.”
NetApp global benefits program manager Lisa Morrow says: “We’re only just starting to tap into the potential that people data in the modern workplace offers. There’s huge potential for us as HR professionals to make a tangible business impact by harnessing this information, but it’s essential that our teams have the skills needed to interpret data and provide insights in a way that is useful to business leaders. The more we develop our understanding of people analytics, the more we’ll be able to contribute at the boardroom level, offering expertise that can feed into business strategy and encourage greater productivity and company loyalty among employees.”