AUGUST - 2022HR TECH OUTLOOK9organisation structures that optimise activity and define accountability. In this way, the disciplines that can make up Workforce Management and the resulting outcomes provide a stable launch pad for other, more employee-centric, perhaps traditional, HR activities.For example, Talent Sourcing can be more informed on where and how to proactively pool candidates; Talent and Development teams can start to cater to current and future capability gaps; Mobility and Succession efforts can be directed toward target-state organisation structures. In this sense, a strong Workforce Management offering, characterised by the capability to govern, provide foresight and advise accordingly, can play the stabilising core to the arms and legs of HR outreach to the organisation and its people.So where does People Analytics fit in?It's worth recognising that analytics is not reporting. Reporting reflects back data and summary level information to an audience and can, these days, largely be designed, automated and released within modern digital HR platforms. Analytics is concerned with describing what happened to the extent it can be understood why those things happened, predicting how these trends might extend into the future and prescribing actions through scenario modelling to understand how to influence certain outcomes. Descriptive, predictive, prescriptive. This is exciting stuff (yes, I would say that), but also extremely distracting. It's easy to get caught up in an analytics arms race. But the value of good analytics lies in the enablement of decision making, strategy setting and staging interventions. Beyond this, even the coolest analytics could kindly be termed an exercise in futility.To illustrate: would you agree that an insight is impotent until acted upon? Using your eyes to look down the road while driving is no use if your cognitive and fine motor skills aren't engaged to make the necessary adjustments. Do you drive because you can see? Not in general ­ unless the Pacific Coast route or French Riviera are involved ­ but take away your sight and now your objective, the destination, is unreachable. And forget about making any small adjustments or critical interventions that keep you and everyone else safe along the way.Analytics are the eyes to Workforce Management's cognitive and fine motor skills. In order to optimally manage the workforce, leveraging evidence-based decisions makes perfect sense. The macro-level nature of, for example, Strategic Workforce Planning, or Org Optimisation, lends itself to data-led, analytical enablement. However, the more employee-centric the analytics use case becomes, the more difficult it becomes to apply analytics to affect a specific outcome. So, the two areas have a natural affinity, and this affinity is born out in the way many organisations choose to set them up as organisational bed-fellows, not because they are the same thing, but because it's a very good place to start applying evidence-based decision making.Of course, I'm not suggesting that data or evidence-based decision making should be constrained to Workforce Management disciplines within HR. There is far too much value in being a data-led HR function to be ignored. However, I would suggest making the link between analytics and Workforce Management first enables the onward application of analytics across HR as analytical capability matures.Every HR function should be embracing People Analytics as an enabler to delivering value ­ through decisions, through HR strategy, through interventions. Just remember to zoom out ­ as The Handmaid's Tale hero, Margaret Atwood, would have it: "Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions". My brother would completely agree. The disciplines that can make up workforce management and the resulting outcomes provide a stable launchpad for other, more employee-centric, perhaps traditional, HR activities
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