As the financial services industry pursues many enterprise and cultural transformations to become more agile, organizations are looking for ways to accelerate change by better understanding their most valuable asset – their workforce. People analytics offers a powerful solution to meet this challenge and give companies a competitive edge.
The process of collecting data through dedicated tools within an organization, people analytics allows companies to extract actionable insights that improve the way we do business. This data ranges from age, tenure, gender, location, job title, salary, and performance ratings, through to more role specific information, such as sales quotas or issues that have been addressed and closed within project management tools such as Jira.
People analytics can unearth insights about the workforce and its informal networks. Particularly in large organizations, this can help unlock the potential of entrepreneurial networks by bringing agility to the organization’s hierarchy traditionally designed to focus on stability and efficiency. People analytics achieves this by helping HR, business functions and leaders to make data-backed decisions about the organization’s workforce.
A strong people analytics capability will give organizations an edge through a clear focus on people-centric transformation. Three strategic areas of optimization are important here, and we will examine each in turn:
Talent management has come a long way, evolving from occasional or ad hoc initiatives to a near real-time function that must keep up with the changing project needs, market conditions and skillsets. For instance, the recent ‘war for talent’ has seen the time to fill vacancies increase to over two months on average – almost a full business quarter. At the same time, attrition has become a complex topic that is not always tied to working hours or compensation.
HR departments accordingly need to rethink their strategy, or risk becoming the scapegoat for their organizations’ failure to grow and compete.
Data from Jira around book of work (current and planned), for example, can be used to drive predictive people analytics that enable evidence-based decision making for multi-dimensional issues. These can include:
People analytics’ biggest impact on the bottom line is through supporting operational efficiency, providing leaders with insights and data to inform strategies and make better decisions faster. In this context, metric-based people analytics can be used to improve operations by providing insight such as:
Any Agile transformation requires a robust communications strategy to promote accountability, ownership, and transparency. People analytics, backed by data from Jira and communications channels such as Teams, can be leveraged here to answer questions including:
People analytics can be a transformation accelerator for any organization aspiring to leverage their workforce and talent as an asset. Placing both people and data at its core, a people analytics capability enables the optimization of the HR function, operational efficiency and communications – all vital to the success of a programme of cultural and organizational change.
Every company is unique and driving sustainable adoption of agility practices – from the boardroom to the development shop – requires close collaboration with Agile experts. Capco’s Business Agility experts partner with organizations through every step of their transformation journey, from determining the organizational readiness to scaling and accelerating change. Contact us to discuss how we can help your firm establish, improve or scale Agile ways of working and achieve your transformational goals.
1 U.S. Companies Anticipate Increased Hiring in the First Half of 2023 (prnewswire.com)