5 Key Takeaways from People Analytics Summit 2021

HR Leaders’ People Analytics Summit 2021 took place virtually on Tuesday 26th January. It was an interesting day of discussions around the issues HR teams have faced over the last year, as well as how data and People Analytics have been used to address and overcome them. Here are our 5 key takeaways from the day: 

Shift in work 

By now, we all know that the pandemic has brought about a huge shift in the way organisations work, practically overnight. This was a big topic of discussion and one particular point was how People Analytics has helped businesses understand which roles can be performed effectively remotely and which really require an office.  

The panels predicted that People Analytics will help organisations model for a post-covid world, by allowing leaders to listen and analyse what is and isn’t currently working for employees and building those insights into their planning. 

Employee wellbeing 

The pandemic has also brought employee wellbeing to the forefront and encouraged organisations to reshuffle their plans to focus more on wellbeing initiatives. Listening tools and engagement apps have not only enabled employers to support and communicate with a remote workforce but also capture new data on questions such as: 

• Do employees still have good communication with their managers? 
• Do employees feel they have meaningful connections with their colleagues?
• Are employees getting sufficient breaks from work whilst working remotely?

Bringing this into People Analytics with other data points such as performance, productivity and retention data is helping organisations to understand and predict the impact of wellbeing and understand where to take action. Panellists also highlighted that they’ve found managers in particular have struggled adjusting to managing teams remotely. 

Inclusion & diversity 

Inclusion and diversity was highlighted as one of three pillars to building a People Analytics foundation to create a healthy, high performing company that scales. It was a recurring theme throughout the day, with emphasis put on how People Analytics can help find the root causes of why minority groups are not advancing within an organisation and drive actions to resolve them.

Simple insights 

A sentiment repeated throughout the event was the need for simple insights that could be understood and acted upon easily. Attendees commented that they were put off by overly busy screens and were more interested in quick insights. Panellists agreed that it’s important not to get lost in the sophistication of analysis and methodologies and instead present simple messages. You must be able to boil data down into usable solutions that are accessible to all people managers rather than contained in the hands of a few technical specialists.

This is a principle which has been at the core of the development of our solution illumin8HR.  

People Analytics is Business Analytics 

It’s vital to recognise that People Analytics and Business Analytics run in tandem. As one panellist commented, "... you need to start with the business question". For People Analytics to have impact and to gain stakeholder engagement from the top down, it's important to start with your business goals and align analytics to those.

The overarching message of the event was that People Analytics continues to prove vital thanks to the rising importance of using data to inform decision making and will have huge importance even in a post-covid landscape.

To find out more about how our People Analytics solution, illumin8HR, is helping our partners’ end users identify root causes and provide pathways to resolution through simple, easy to understand insights, get in touch.