With workforce accounting for close to 50% of most organisation’s operating expenses, it is critical this investment is working effectively for you – ensuring placement of people in the right roles and at the right time, using employee engagement as a predictor of performance, ensuring rewards & recognition initiatives continue to reinforce business strategy, accurate disclosure of regulatory requirements etc. Bringing disparate data sets together and applying meaningful analysis can dramatically improve a traditionally expensive and subjective component of business.

Some common factors that contribute to the complexity of analytics for HR include:

Maturity Challenges

• Workforce decisions and data collection typically driven out and through HR departments who have tended to play a more operational than strategic role in organisations
• Analytics & insight skillsets not traditionally developed within HR
  
• Misalignment between business & people strategy remains in many organisations.

Data Challenges

• Much of the HR data is in unstructured formats like qualitative feedback, performance review documentations, exit interviews and daily sentiments
• The HR data typically suffers from poor data quality and governance due to the way it is collected at various points in the employee lifecycle
  
• Existing reports in most ERP systems are tactical in nature and only focus on the measurement of performance related KPIs

Technology Challenges

• Limited capability to easily “slice and dice” data into preferred views
• Organisation structures make it difficult to easily to segment workforce data into meaningful grouping that highlight patterns
  
• Continued difficulty with the integration of unstructured data, external data and workforce data to conduct a comprehensive analysis
  

Process Challenges

• Narrow approach to HR data analysis, typically focused on workforce performance
• Traditional focus on conducting surveys, interviews and feedback, and segregated analysis, but not on integrating data to identify patterns
  
• Lack of consistent understanding of reporting needs and expectations 
  
• Utilizing HR analysis as a reactive rather proactive method to assist the HR organization
  

KPMG’s Workforce Analytics allow analyses of people metrics such as payroll, benefits, attrition, performance, leave, identifying further value potential and supporting fact-based HR management decision-making.

At KPMG, we are interested in understanding dimensions of competitive advantage to better advise our clients.  Having completed an in-depth Human Capital Analysis, our 5C Framework underpins the principle that business strategy and competitive advantage needs to be translated into the impact on people.  Only then can an organization effectively leverage one of its largest operating costs.   The Framework helps our clients identify opportunities for workforce cost reduction, investment and/or investment assurance without impacting compliance, engagement and customer relationships.