Data science is the cornerstone of modern-day decision-making. Companies across the board today depend on effective data science and its capabilities to take the right decision and ensure business success. 

And with good reason. 

Data science and analytics provide a clear and easy solution for companies hoping to navigate these disruptive times. Data has quickly risen to become an essential factor that determines business success. Yet while it remains central to impactful business decisions, having the right technological architecture in the form of data science and analytics in place is required to make sense of such data troves and enable impactful decision-making. 

People Analytics: Merging data science and human intelligence

The talent landscape has undergone tectonic shifts in past years. Much like the business ecosystem at large, companies are today faced with renewed talent considerations. What has taken the moniker of 'war-for-talent' today poses a threat to business growth and agility. The ensuing period of hybrid work and dissolution of geographical boundaries when searching for talent means today's companies need better technological solutions that raise the efficacy of their talent interventions.

Today the fields of data science and analytics are merging to provide companies with a powerful tool to hire, engage, and retain their essential talent better. People or Talent Analytics is the application of data science and analytics to human resources. Using data science and analytics techniques to analyse key HR metrics today is critical in ensuring HR leaders across APAC can support their business' growth. 

The role of data science in modern-day talent management is multifold. By turning troves of employee data into essential and actionable insights, HR leaders can improve employee experience, engagement, and productivity and, in turn, create a direct impact on growth and profitability. People analytics helps anchor talent decisions on facts and helps fight bias to improve performance management systems. Its role in improving talent decisions across vital areas like hiring, upskilling, and retention makes it the cornerstone of building future-ready talent management practices and helps ensure organisational scalability, agility, and resilience to future disruptions. 

Strategies to build a data-empowered business and workforce

While using data science to enable better decision-making within HR is not new, its role has never been more pivotal. By analysing talent data efficiently and thoroughly with the help of advanced data analytics methods, it enables HR leaders to work with large amounts of talent data quickly to develop data-driven insights, informing talent decisions and improving their company's talent outcomes.

To have the right people analytics framework, companies must first understand the multifaceted role of data analytics. A recent whitepaper by BIPO highlighted the four major roles of analytics today. 

• Descriptive Analytics: it deals with trends and relationships to describe the cause of change over time.
• Predictive Analytics: is the application of algorithms and machine learning techniques on historical data to help identify risks and opportunities.
• Diagnostic Analytics: deals chiefly with revealing why something happens and enables better troubleshooting.
• Prescriptive Analytics: suggests to businesses courses of action based on patterns and insights from big data. 

While building a robust, data-empowered HR practice, the following play a key role:

• Have the right data: Whether recruitment or upskilling, data analytics works on data that can translate into actionable and meaningful insights. Having a rich data set on your workforce becomes the critical first component of data-empowered talent practice. Integrate data across multiple sources. 
• Invest in HRMS platforms that support Business Intelligence: To enable HR leaders to leverage technologies without necessarily getting into the nitty gritty of how they work, it's essential to invest in quick and impactful HRMS platforms. For example, business Intelligence tools such as BIPO's cloud-based HR management system help make data analytics easy to use all while delivering superior results. 
• Use data insights to create the right narrative: A critical component of a data-empowered talent practice is to make sense of the growing complexity. Today people analytics platforms like BIPO help ensure that data insights work cohesively together to form the right narrative, enabling HR leaders to be agile in their talent management. 
• Leverage data visualisations: Data visualisation provides an effective way to understand how the talent landscape is poised to evolve. Its usage within the different aspects of talent management help improves their efficacy. 

The way ahead

Recent research by Bain & Company found over a 40% disparity between the productivity of organisations that had invested in talent-focused analytics and those that hadn't. While there remain challenges to successfully adopting a people analytics framework across APAC, easy-to-use, cloud-based HRMS platforms like BIPO help simplify and drive a positive impact on the employee journey. With the nature of business disruption dawning ever new masks, it's pivotal for companies to have the right technology partners that ensure HR leaders can leverage people analytics and drive productivity and resilience in their workforce.

Find out how BIPO’s HR Management System with BI capabilities can help transform your HR operations. Connect with the team from BIPO today.