HR’s Big Challenge: Solving The Future Of Work

What is the role of data and what can it do to support better strategies?

The role of HR has significantly evolved in the past few decades. Recently, we have seen a merger of HR leaders and business decision makers proactively working together to identify and quickly solve problems around engagement, productivity and overwork within their organization. In the midst of a pandemic, their combined role has grown in importance, particularly around attrition risks and mitigating the negative impacts of remote work. As HR leaders rise to support and improve business outcomes, what is the role of data and what can it do to support better strategies?
 

Previously, pinpointing where attrition risks, engagement issues, or overwork existed took months or was determined too late in the process through exit interviews, resulting in slow reaction or corporate change. In our current world, companies don’t have the luxury of ignoring these issues and are not able to stay competitive, or even remain in business, with historically slow processes. Due to the proliferation of data within companies, organizations have the opportunity to analyze their extensive data and deduce positive insights rapidly to transform business operations and outcomes.

Workplace data has been available for decades in the form of email and calendar metadata. Together with physical workplace information about how employees use and interact in office space, this data is powerful in helping company leaders get a holistic view of the workday. For many companies, remote work is now the primary workplace modality, and even after the pandemic is over, we can safely assume that a larger percentage of the workforce will continue to work from home. This means an even larger fraction of the workday is now captured through existing collaboration tools. The most successful HR divisions have taken advantage of that existing data to understand the reality of whether they have set their employees up for success with the right tools, and be armed with the factual information to make informed organizational change. 

This new way of working challenges HR leaders to not just focus on understanding HR data alone, but instead get a broader view through workplace collaboration data. This data exposes issues that were previously beyond the purview of HR alone and ultimately helps support and drive typical HR metrics. HR can use workplace analytics to help support decisions on collaboration processes, communication tools, and innovation strategy to name a few. HR then becomes the hub through which any major decision that touches people, how they collaborate, or how the organization functions. 

To understand collaboration, HR should use metadata from internal communication tools. Email, for example, provides information on how teams are communicating and collaborating across the organization. Similarly, calendar data indicates which teams spend time together and where they meet. Many other data sources are available and vary depending on the department, but they all share similar formats and indicate similar organizational phenomena. Aggregating at a team level removes individual information which enables HR to understand how work actually happens within the organization while protecting employee privacy.

With this data in hand, HR can now collaborate and inform people-decisions across a variety of functions. Decisions like what communication tools to use and how to design workplaces, and who to bring back to the workplace first for example, are predicated on the notion that they impact how people collaborate. HR will be poised to step in and provide hard data on what these patterns are today and derive insights from this data to indicate which options may be more desirable.

This data-driven approach, led by HR, leads to a faster and more accurate organizational decisions. Rather than debating the current state of collaboration and how people are spending time, decision-makers can start from hard facts and move on to discussing initiatives to improve. Once those initiatives are implemented, the organization can know the impact in a matter of weeks from this same data. If it turns out that the initiative isn’t having the desired effect, leaders can quickly pivot to other options.

All of this puts HR in a much more central role within the organization. With HR identifying issues and connecting different constituencies to quickly solve them, managers can focus on day to day operations. To make this transition effective, HR needs to assert its leading role and authority to drive change.

It’s important to note that HR is already beginning to serve a much more central, collaborative role - one that is able to support Real Estate, IT, business unit leaders and more. With this data in hand, HR can help guide major organizational decisions, from informing M&A processes by analyzing workstyles to supporting the development of a workplace that is more conducive for innovation and collaboration, and even affecting meeting practices. All of these ultimately impact HR metrics and help reduce attrition risks, overwork, etc. With deeper involvement in these decisions, HR then can take its place as the true backbone of a company, bringing people to the core of every decision.

Ben Waber, PhD, is the President and Co-founder of Humanyze, a workplace analytics company. He is a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, previously worked as a senior researcher at Harvard Business School, and received his Ph.D. in organizational science from MIT for his work with Alex “Sandy” Pentland’s Human Dynamics group. Visit https://humanyze.com/  Connect Ben Waber