All HR professionals operate on two levels and regularly have to switch their focus. On the one hand, they deal with many very important systems on the organisational level, which directly impact employees: e.g. remuneration, talent management. It requires analysis and critical thinking.
On the other hand, HR professionals often deal with people, their individual fears, hopes and problems. It requires empathy and understanding and not surprisingly HR profession is often called People profession.
So modern HR are flexible, and the modern HR technology can make them even more flexible while delivering more measurable impact at the same time. One of advantages of modern HR tech tools is that they can visualise “outliers” which can represent potential problems and potential opportunities.
One such example is in the video. The average metric for Potential for four branches is 0,48 which is well… average. But the same metric for Branch D (0,64) is almost two times than for Branch B (0,36) and two other branches have similar metrics. What can cause the difference? Employees in all four branches # use the same learning material, all learners are in middle managers.
The hypothesis we can check is that recruitment and retention in branches work differently and employees are more competent in the office D. If the hypothesis is wrong (the recruitment process is standard) the HR professional can switch their attention to management: what support they provide, are their coaches and mentors, etc.
Almost all analytical tools nowadays use the same sequence:
- analyse individual employees,
- analyse coaching (how managers support their direct reports),
- analyse motivation system.
Today HR technology allows to shift focus – from global challenges (company, branch, department) to employee-level problems (the specific conflict of Manager X and Employee Y). HR professionals who can master the modern HR technology can see the problems before they become threats and identify new opportunities. They can be proactive.