Read an industry report or blog post on hot HR trends and technologies today, and you are bound to see workforce analytics near the top. Analysts and commentators agree: workforce analytics has become a “must have” tool for HR and a key component of delivering business value. But how do you get started with this complex topic? This paper outlines five simple steps you can take to get started on your path to workforce analytics. By thinking through the first four steps, you can develop the requirements to support the fifth step: selecting the right workforce analytics solution for your organization. Download this white paper to find out how you can simplify and accelerate your journey from HR metrics to workforce analytics.

1. Five Steps to Getting Started with
Workforce Analytics
Read an industry report or blog post on hot HR trends and technologies today, and you are bound
to see workforce analytics near the top. Analysts and commentators agree: workforce analytics has
become a “must have” tool for HR and a key component of delivering business value. But how do
you get started with this complex topic?
This paper outlines the five steps you can take to simplify and accelerate your journey to workforce analytics.
By thinking through the first four steps, you can develop the requirements to support the fifth step: selecting
the right workforce analytics solution for your organization.
DEFINE
Questions
ACCESS
Data
ANSWER
Questions
SHARE
Answers
SELECT
SOLUTION
1 2 3 4 5

2. STEP 1: DEFINE THE QUESTIONS
The purpose of analytics is to improve decisions. If those decisions affect how well the business will perform,
then the organization stands to increase its business value. It is therefore key to start with the end in mind.
As a first step, identify your business objectives (such as, improving the bottom line), and then clearly define the key questions you need
the solution to answer to support those objectives (such as, how does compensation relate to performance, which of our top talent are
at risk of leaving, and what are our most efficient and successful recruiting sources).
When formulating these questions, look to more than just core workforce questions, and seek answers to more strategic questions
that will improve business outcomes. This will help in your selection of a workplace analytics solution, streamline the implementation,
and support your business case by demonstrating how investing in workforce analytics links with solving key business problems.
Core workforce questions may include:
I How many people are there?
I How many people are needed?
I Are people leaving at a high or low rate?
I Is the capacity for work enough for the work required?
I What is the overall cost to hire, retain, or develop people?
I Is the total cost of the workforce increasing quickly or slowly?
I How well are avoidable costs, such as absences
or labor relations issues, being controlled?
STEP 2: ACCESS THE DATA
The second step involves the most common failure point for analytics’ implementations:
accessing the data.
Data is typically:
I Located in multiple systems and formats
I Incomplete and constantly changing
The traditional response to these problems is to create a data warehouse. Data warehouses allow for a single view across different sources
of data, such as performance and compensation, and can show how the workforce has changed over time. However, data warehouse
projects are notorious for being time consuming, complex, and costly. Creating a data warehouse involves IT and/or business intelligence
experts, who work to standardize data definitions, correct data quality issues, build a data structure or schema, and load data by creating
ETL (extraction, transformation, load) processes.
According to empirical studies, between 50 and 70 percent of data-warehousing projects fail –
primarily due to the complex and ever changing nature of data and the analytics requirements.
Strategic workforce questions may include:
I Where does our top talent come from?
I How effectively does the recruiting process secure
the right people?
I Do performance measures and rewards align to retain
the right people?
I Is leadership capability increasing fast enough to
meet business demand?
I Do people get moved or promoted often enough
to build capacity and retain the right people?
I Who of our top talent is at risk of leaving, and why?
2
I Inconsistent and of poor quality
I In need of transformations and restructuring

3. Fortunately, new techniques are available today that mean traditional, one-off data warehousing approaches can be avoided – thanks to
cloud and in-memory analysis technologies. This Big Data approach can reduce your time-to-value dramatically, as well as your solution’s
implementation and ongoing maintenance costs. Rather than a year or more of implementation time and expense, an out-of-the-box
cloud solution utilizing in-memory technology can be deployed in as little as one month. This type of solution can unify and clean your
data – from multiple HR and business systems – without the upfront costs associated with traditional data warehousing. This allows you
to focus on identifying what data you need (based on the business questions you want to ask), and also accelerates deployment.
Data security is an important consideration. When choosing a cloud solution, look for solutions that have direct control over where your data will
reside, and have documented policies and procedures in place for accessing and securing your data. Cloud vendors that have such policies audited
and reviewed will have formal documentation in what is known as an SSAE 16 report.
STEP 3: ANSWER THE QUESTIONS
Once your data is in place, you can start answering your workforce questions. Depending on the solution
you have selected, getting answers to questions will take you down one of two paths.
Traditional business intelligence tools take a “bottom-up” approach: you start with a blank sheet and create a report. You must be
prepared to formulate calculations based on your specialized knowledge of the data, the business, human resources, and the business
intelligence tool. In addition to being time consuming and requiring advanced knowledge and skills, this approach also has the challenge
of inconsistency – reports created by one person can differ dramatically from reports created by another. To solve these challenges,
many organizations create a centralized team of dedicated resources to create and manage reports, which serves to increase total solution
costs, while also creating further separation between the end users and the data.
Next generation solutions support a “top-down” approach, in which topic areas, questions, and visualizations are pre-built and standardized
based on HR best practices. You drill into a topic area (such as retention) and select the question you want to answer (such as, which
employee characteristics are influencing resignations the most?). This is particularly helpful for non-expert users, such as HR business
partners and business leaders, who want answers but do not have the technical skills of an analyst. Such self-service approaches to
workforce analytics both save valuable time and costs associated with specialized teams, and empower users with the necessary insights.
3
Next generation solutions support a “top-down” approach,
with pre-built topic areas, questions, and visualizations.

4. For more advanced analytics users, look for capabilities that let you explore pre-developed metrics in real time, segment the workforce,
slice and dice the data, highlight outliers, and perform comparisons to get to specific nuggets of fact-based insight. These systems save
considerable amounts of time by doing all of the data handling and calculations for you so that you can focus on analysis and exploring
the answers from multiple angles.
You no longer need to re-invent the wheel when you implement a workforce analytics solution. Cloud solutions that provide best practice
analytics out-of-the-box streamline deployment, and also ensure your analytics capabilities grow over time, at no additional cost to you.
STEP 4: SHARE THE ANSWERS
With answers to critical questions about your workforce in-hand, the challenge becomes how to share the
answers with your business leaders. HR has a unique responsibility: to enable the whole organization to make
better workforce decisions. Whatever approach is taken towards workforce analytics, it must include the
capacity to share timely, accurate answers to everyday business questions – in a clear and compelling way.
Many workforce analytics programs fail to appreciate the complexities of the sharing step and provide limited reports or a one-dimensional
view of the answers. As a best practice, leverage dashboards to provide an at-a-glance view of key performance indicators to business
leaders. A good analytics solution will allow end users to interact with dashboards by applying different filters to the data, such as
highlighting specific roles, high performers, or new hires. This supports better insights and decision-making. For presentation purposes,
use visualizations (or visual representations) to tell the story behind the data – presenting the insights and interpretation you have
developed based on your analysis.
People’s brains are wired to quickly recognize the patterns and trends in visual answers. Rather than sharing rows of data points, look to
leverage interactive visualizations in your dashboards and slideshows. However, be sure to use the right visualization – the wrong visual
representation of data can be as damaging or misleading as sharing incorrect data. Best in class solutions will associate the correct visuals
with the relevant analytics for you, mitigating this risk.
4
Share insights via interactive dashboards
Identify opportunities to eliminate manual
reports. Many companies produce
thousands of reports a year, a surprisingly
high number of which are never read.
Replace these antiquated reports with
secure, accurate, automatic dashboards
and slideshows shared online or via
mobile devices.

5. STEP 5: SELECT THE SOLUTION
It seems counter-intuitive: you need a workforce analytics solution in place to do the steps above.
However, by thinking about the experience and outcomes you desire from workforce analytics,
you can make a more informed decision about the solution to implement.
Here are some key checklist requirements to consider. Ensure your workforce analytics solution:
I Answers the questions that are key to your business, while also allowing for growth in the future.
I Leverages in-memory analytics, allowing you to fast track the benefits of a data warehouse – without the costs –
and efficiently unify and analyze disparate data.
I Combines the rapid innovation of the Cloud with data security to deliver anytime, anywhere access to answers.
I Includes best-practice topic areas, questions, and visualizations, allowing you to drill down to quickly get the answers you need.
I Provides capabilities for analysts to explore pre-developed metrics in real time, slicing and dicing to get to key insights.
I Provides casual users, HR business partners, and executives with interactive visualizations, and pre-built questions
to guide them through exploration of key workforce issues.
I Lets you streamline the delivery of dashboards and slideshows by sharing online at-a-glance views of key performance indicators
with business leaders.
I Enables easy creation of slideshows to tell the story behind the data through interactive visualizations.
I Supports collaboration amongst analysts, HR business partners, and business leaders through secure sharing of workforce data.
SUMMARY
Workforce analytics has become an essential HR capability. The demand from the business for
timely and effective answers to the core and strategic workforce questions is continually increasing.
Daunting as this may seem, a series of new innovations has made it possible for HR to deliver
insightful answers to business questions far more quickly, cost effectively, and accurately than
before – accelerating HR on its journey towards playing an increasingly strategic role in
organizations.
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