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Workforce Intelligence – Better Ways of Achieving Operational Effectiveness

Workforce Intelligence is a journey! Gail Sturgess describes the different elements that constitute Workforce Intelligence and provides a “route map” to help you understand and decide what you want to do and when on the journey.

by Gail Sturgess

Have you ever climbed, or hiked, up a mountain? The experts all tell you – walk with your eyes on the ground in front of you, not looking up. The reason is, firstly, if your eyes are facing upwards you won’t see the dangers on the ground, and secondly, you will become disillusioned and want to give up on the journey. You look up only occasionally to make sure you are still on the right track and to address any unexpected problems that could arise on the journey. The Workforce Intelligence journey is no different.

Workforce Intelligence is the result of using a combination of tools, metrics, data and statistical analysis to gain greater insight into the organisation’s workforce, talent management processes, and business performance information to enable management to plan and build an organisation capable of delivering organisational strategy over the longer term.

Workforce Intelligence is a subset of Business Intelligence – a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision making.

So the “intelligence” part of both phrases is the end result of the processes that enable improved decision-making that leads to improved organisational performance.

Both Workforce Intelligence and Business Intelligence have a number of sub-processes that are essential to ensuring that good, clean data is used for these business-critical activities. These are:

• Metrics – Any type of measurement used to gauge some quantifiable component of an organisation’s performance, such as return on investment (ROI), employee and customer churn rates, revenues, profit per FTE, and so on. Metrics can be within a single area of business, such as employee turnover rate for HR, or can come from two or more areas of business, such as turnover per FTE, which uses information from both financial and HR information databases. Systematic approaches, such as the balanced scorecard methodology can be employed to transform an organisation's mission statement and business strategy into specific and quantifiable goals, and to monitor the organisation's performance in terms of achieving those goals. So metrics is a collection of standards of measurement by which efficiency, performance, progress, or quality of a plan, process, or product can be assessed.
• Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance. Organisations commonly apply analytics to business data, to describe, predict, and improve business performance. Analytics builds quantitative processes for a business in order to arrive at optimal decisions and to perform business knowledge discovery. Analytics has a number of “applied” subsets including the following:
• Data analytics is the science of examining raw data with the purpose of drawing conclusions about that information. Data analytics focuses on inference, the process of deriving a conclusion based solely on what is already known by the researcher. Data analytics is used in many industries to allow companies and organisations to make better business decisions, and in the sciences to verify or disprove existing models or theories.
• Workforce analytics is a combination of software, data, and a methodology that applies statistical models to workforce-related and other relevant data, allowing organisational leaders to optimise their return on investment in human capital. »

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