Even before the onset of the pandemic, analytics, along with digital transformation, has been revamping every aspect of the corporate world, including Human Resources (HR). Businesses today have been compelled to adopt a more agile working model to ensure that the workforce stays motivated, engaged, and productive. The new normal of working from home has triggered a ‘swift shift’ in workforce management.

According to a Gartner report, nearly 50% of the surveyed organizations stated that 81% or more of their employees are working remotely. This change in the workforce ecosystem has presented HR with new challenges. Over the last year, HR departments have been aggressively and speedily working towards creating new policies and regulations to ensure employee engagement and safety, new metrics to monitor employee productivity, and building innovative practices that can help them achieve a work-life balance while working remotely. And all this was achieved seamlessly by leveraging the advantages of ‘people analytics’.

The pandemic has offered organizations an exceptional opportunity to reimagine their workplace strategy. By incorporating people analytics and embracing digital transformation of the HR department, companies have taken a giant leap towards building a more collaborative and efficient workplace. A recent CEB Analytics study revealed that companies that have successfully adopted HR analytics can improve talent outcomes by 9%, generating a 4% gross improvement and USD 12.8 million in savings for every USD 1 billion in revenue. It equips HR professionals to make smarter, more strategic, deeply data-driven and goal-focused decisions during recruitment, employee engagement as well as employee retention. Google's HR team, known as 'People Operations', has effectively reinvented HR within their organization by incorporating people analytics. The result? High retention rates with an employee survey participation rate of over 90%. organizations today have begun to recognise the significance of analytics and digital transformation in workforce management. 

Here’s how People Analytics & Digital Transformation will shape HR

• Boost recruiting & retention: Utilising predictive analysis in personnel data, HR professionals can analyse potential candidates' historical and real-time data sets. It will help determine whether a candidate is a good fit for an organization before hiring thereby improving the organization's recruitment and retention process.
• Strategic decision making: Analytics and digital transformation will enable HR agility to build flexible teams, facilitate remote working, third-party staff augmentation, digital processes, and streamline governance, thus helping them glean meaningful insights that will help in strategic decision making.
• Reinvent HR: Incorporating digital HR will allow organizations to accelerate migration to cloud-hosted HR applications and platforms. Adopting advanced analytics tools and smart automation will enable HR leaders to eliminate manual tasks and replace them with paperless processes. Incorporating digital technologies and models in HR operations will improve recruiting, learning, performance management and strategic workforce planning capabilities.

It is abundantly clear that people analytics is the future of Human Resource Management. As per LinkedIn's Global Talent Trends survey, 73% of HR leaders said that incorporating People Analytics will be a major priority for their company in the next five years. 

Companies are proactively looking for HR professionals skilled in utilising advanced HR analytics and digital tools to make data-smart decisions. Google search shows more than 1,690 lakh open people analytics job roles in the country. Honing your analytical skills can help you improve your decision-making competencies and empower you to become a future-ready data-smart HR professional in a dynamic workplace.