Congratulations, you’ve gathered your HR data, you have set up your reporting, and you are now producing metrics around your company’s employees.  So what next?  The temptation is to run and show all this wonderful new reporting HR is producing to everyone, but consider what you are actually trying to achieve; offering insight and meaning to the business.

The importance of narrative

Human beings are a communicating species and right from the first people huddled around fires in the night, we have enjoyed telling stories.  And telling stories was the primary mechanism by which we understood the world around us; tales of gods creating the world or controlling natural events, tales of heroes doing great deeds.

We have moved on somewhat since then but creating a clear story when sharing information is vital to help us get our message across.  Most people don’t have the time or inclination to engage with raw data and, if you want to grab their interest, you have to consider carefully both what and how you are communicating.

Information overload

A client once told me they had reviewed their HR Analytics and started running all the reports that were available from their HR system, about 15 or so.  However, they quickly found they, “weren’t really telling us anything,” so stopped running them. 

I have heard this tale a number of times.  With no clear business issue creating demand for insight, HR often report on too much at once leading to data overload.  Then, if there is no immediately obvious critical concern identified, it is easy to discard HR Analytics as a time-consuming activity which offers no value.

Analytics’ place in story-telling

To see a successful use of Analytics and story-telling, we can look at sports journalism.  Every sport generates a mass of data about each match or event which takes place, but this will be of little interest to the average reader.  To hook the average reader the journalist needs to create a narrative of the event and be selective in what data they use. 

Consider tennis.  Any written match report has the basic data up-front, giving high level, key information and immediate insight to the reader.  What follows is then the narrative of the game, highlighting key events that occurred during the match and pulling interesting findings from a much wider dataset. 

This dataset covers a number of items such as Aces hit, Double Faults, % 1st and 2nd Serve Points Won, distance covered on court, Forehand errors, Backhand errors, and so on nearly endlessly.  Fascinating for hardcore fans, invaluable for coaches and players, deadly dull and off-putting to the average reader.

Telling your Analytics story

When you are preparing HR’s report for the business, you need to embrace the power of story-telling and narrative.  Identify your organisation’s standard headline figures and place them up-front. Senior Management want to see some data, and as long as you keep it to a small number of simple, easy to review metrics, they’ll start off with a high level understanding of the state of HR.  Metrics will vary from company to company, but are likely to include classics as labour turnover, sickness absence, and so forth.

Don’t put any other data into your report that isn’t a business insight supported by a narrative.  Is it valuable to know that time to hire is stable on last month?  Does your senior management need to be aware that the percentage of black and minority ethnic (BAME) candidates for jobs is up 3% on the same month last year?  The answer in most cases is probably not and simply handing over all your output data switches readers off. 

However, if you are currently running a project aimed at reducing the time to hire or one to increase the number of BAME candidates that apply for your roles then yes, it is important and you need to provide insight into what is happening as a result of these initiatives and what impact you are seeing in the data.  And that won’t simply be one figure from this month’s reporting on its own, but a result of digging into your data and describing the trend you see.

Supporting your journey

Innecto is passionate about helping companies embrace Analytics and start their data journey.  Embracing HR Analytics in your organisation now is about preparing for the future, and building your own confidence in gathering and interpreting HR’s data.  If you want to deliver a valued report to the senior management team then take advantage of the ancient power of story-telling to create a simple streamlined report which is eagerly anticipated by its target audience rather tossed aside.

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