People Analytics Success Rate Declining
The Data
Only 19% of organisations have successfully used people analytics tools to forecast future talent needs despite increasing their use of analytics and tools by 70%. This success rate is down 4% from 3 years ago! This, and other surprising results, from the People Analytics section of the Global Leadership Forecast report for 2018 by Evan Sinar.
"Pressure on the HR function to adopt and excel in people analytics—defined as “the systematic identification and qualification of the people drivers of business outcomes, with the purpose of making better decisions”*—has been intense for several years. Analytics are viewed as a prime route to greater strategic influence, and the thirst for deeper analytics know-how has spawned a five-fold spike in interest over the past five years. Hundreds of articles have been written in HR publications, dozens of conferences dedicated, and entire academic programs in HR analytics offered at universities such as Cornell, Texas A&M, and New York University. With this steady drumbeat of exhortation and energy, surely HR has grown its proficiency in analytics methods since Global Leadership Forecast 2014|2015, right? This current Forecast took a detailed view of analytics progress and practices across more than 2,500 global organizations to ask: What’s the status? What’s emerging? and What works to drive HR—and the enterprise—forward?
Instead of an expected increase in analytics effectiveness, we found that success rates declined over the past three years for every type of analytics we compared (shown in the figure above). Though companies attempted analytics more often than in 2014, these efforts were more likely to fail than to succeed. These struggles were common for more traditional types of analytics (internal benchmarking and gathering efficiency, reactions, or results metrics). On average, only 21 percent of companies were succeeding in these. The picture is even more bleak for emerging forms of analytics, such as creating growth-centric leadership planning models, using “what if” scenarios to forecast future talent needs, and data visualization and storytelling to compel the audience. On average, only 18 percent of organizations succeed here."Continue reading Evan Sinar's article.