HR In The Age Of AI

How people analytics is redefining HR

 

A historian, a diagnostician, and a futurist walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says,  “Oh look, it’s HR! Grab a seat at the table!” Over the past decade or two, human resources (HR) has morphed from being an archivist to an observer and, finally, to a proactive problem solver. How has HR made that transformation? One big reason is people analytics — and I suggest you fasten your seatbelt. Because thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), we are just getting started.

Pull up Your Chair

Years ago, HR was a historian — at least when it came to performance management. We showed up once a year and documented what had happened over the past 12 months of work — provided anyone could remember back that far and could coax everyone into filling out their much-reviled reviews. We used that data mainly for comp or career pathing — and then into the filing cabinet it went.

People analytics flipped that script. With data flowing from continuous feedback, goal management, pulse surveys, calibration, and more, suddenly, we did not have to wait a year to analyze annual reviews or engagement surveys. We became diagnosticians who could actually see the organization in real time and triage accordingly — for more agile and responsive workforce management.  

When the pandemic hit, our ability to look at real-time people analytics was game-changing — it is how we advised leaders and helped guide our organizations through the chaos. It is also a big part of why HR finally has that strategic seat at the table we have all talked about for years.

Be the North Star 

Today, HR professionals, armored with people analytics, make (or should make!) HR a proactive partner in the business, while also helping HR leaders promote a culture of fairness and objectivity in a rapidly evolving world of work. And it ensures that every talent decision made is an arrow pointing towards the organizational North Star. 

Just think of the ways people analytics affect every part of the workforce. 

Performance management: Continuous, regular conversations and ongoing feedback are replacing traditional reviews. The data generated from those interactions helps organizations to understand performance in real time — and can be turned around to help managers have better, more effective conversations to provide actionable feedback, and as a result, evolve into the coaches they need to be.

Equity and bias: Real-time data helps organizations uncover unintentional bias and maintain fairness and objectivity in performance management. For example, data analytics can ensure that feedback is frequent, structured, and consistent or uncover inequalities in skilling and advancement opportunities. 

Goals and alignment: People analytics provide insights that help managers and other leaders see how employee aspirations and performance align with dynamic business objectives — ensuring that everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Recruitment and development: By leveraging people analytics, organizations can spot critical skills and find the right people to fill them. HR can encourage or incentivize employees to set and achieve goals to develop those needed capabilities — ensuring a healthier future for the talent you have.

These have been huge advances. Still, too many HR teams still find themselves knocking down problems only after they occur. People data — collecting, using, and sharing it — is the pathway to a more proactive HR function, one where HR can take a business challenge and use data to solve it. And generative AI is part of what is going to get us there. 

Put on Your Futurist Hat

GenAI. I am sure that term brings up a variety of feelings. Excitement, maybe. Terror, possibly. Confusion, certainly. But I promise, AI does not have to be scary for HR. Embracing AI in HR is not science fiction; it is practical, and it is here. According to Gartner, 81% of HR leaders have explored or implemented AI solutions to improve process efficiency within their organizations. But here is the thing to understand: it is not just about tech tools; it is about the synergy created by sharing people data. 

With the application of AI, people analytics do not just reflect outcomes; they now give HR the power to influence them. And that is huge. AI and data analytics are already helping HR to:
 

1. Shorten discovery time for trends, strengths, and weaknesses.
2. Connect the dots among disparate data to identify opportunities.
3. Find best practices and recommendations for action.
4. Address the unconscious bias we all carry.
5. Sustain transformation across your workforce

HR’s people analytics, combined with the natural language processing capabilities of GenAI, can help leaders make better-informed decisions. 

Here is an example: A manager may ask, “How can I frame the changes, I need this employee to make, without bringing my own bias into the conversation?” AI can draw context from a well of employee data — like goals, previous feedback, recognition, and performance ratings. It can also help managers clearly express expectations and provide actionable takeaways, all while warning managers away from potentially biased word choices.

Break Down the Silos

The application of AI to people data also has incredible implications for HR's role going forward. HR functions have typically worked in our own bubbles — talent acquisition, performance management, employee engagement, and comp and benefits. We have focused on checking the box and delivering data, but that has tended to be backward-looking and limited to a particular function.
 
By sharing data across the different functions in HR and the business, AI can dismantle HR’s silos, creating one coherent conversation and a unified source of actionable insights. That will reshape our HR role to directly influence and respond to emerging business challenges. We will not only be able to spot emergent issues but also predict and meet business challenges before they become business problems. 

Here is an example. You may spot a shortfall in skills with an engineering group in Austin that will create roadblocks for their next production phase. Then, looking at the data, you would be able to ask: Who are our best engineers — who perform these skills expertly — that could be relocated to that project for six months to train the team and solve that issue?  AI and people analytics, together, can serve up those answers. I think that is where we are headed, and quickly.

Embracing AI in this way will mean the difference between HR as an observer and HR as a proactive, anticipatory force that aligns talent management with strategic business outcomes.

Paul Rubenstein from Vizier put it perfectly: “There’s a world where there’ll be winners and losers, managers and organizations who really harness the power of data about people and understand that people data is business data. They will outperform those companies who rely only on inertia and tradition.” 

As this conversation evolves, HR will no longer just have a seat at the table but help drive the agenda, thanks to the unbridled potential of people analytics and AI. The real question is: are we, as HR professionals, ready to evolve, embrace the potent combination of AI and people analytics, and become the futurists of work?  

Jamie Aitken is the Vice President of HR Transformation at Betterworks. She is co-author of the book Make Work Better and draws inspiration from her more than twenty-five years of HR leadership experience, spearheading organizational development, HR transformation, and employee engagement strategies that boost business performance.