- Data is one of those things that people try
to get away from because they go into HR.
And yet data, I think, is the lifeblood of HR
because you make decisions based on data.
Data about candidates, datas about promotion,
data about how people are working.
So you have to be good at data.
The problem is we're drowning in data.
We're drowning in the wrong types of data,
and we can't make sense of it.
I think about it as we have so much data,
but we have so little insight.
So how do we move from data gathering to insight creation
for the HR function?
And I think that's why it's important for HR
to think about data not from a numbers perspective,
but from an insights perspective.
What do you need to know?
What information, insights, and data do you need to know
in order to make decisions quickly,
to make decisions better?
It's asking the right questions,
and then making sure people gather the data for you.
'Cause I can guarantee you, if you're listening to this
you're probably not a data analyst.
There may be a few, but you're probably not a data analyst
so you have to work with a data analyst
to explain to them, this is the data that's important.
This is the insights that we need.
So being able to ask the right questions correctly
to the data analysts is important.
Another way to think about this also is that
do you have the right data?
It's not about having a 360-degree picture
of your employees.
It's about gathering the right and most important pieces
of data to help you make your decisions.
So is it really about how happy are they?
How satisfied are they?
Or is about the behaviors that you can understand
that indicate how happy they are.
'Cause they can say one thing,
but do something completely different.
Every organization is different.
I wish I could hand you a list and say
here are the data points that you have to collect,
but you know from your experience the questions you want
to answer, and then from there the data points
that are going to matter to help you collect that data.
So I encourage you as an HR professional
to think about data, to think about the tools
that you can use and digital channels to collect that data.
And be able to ask these strategic questions.
Because if you don't ask them, nobody else will.
And you need to have those insights
in order to be able to move into the digital transformation
as well as you would like to be able to.