Explore how HR leaders can drive innovation, productivity, and business success with connected data. Discover insights and practical advice from those leading the way.
Oracle has published a whitepaper [download for free here] detailing the opportunities and shortcomings of HR in an increasingly digital and data-based world. Reporting on the results of three separate mobile-only 23-question global surveys conducted between September 2018 and January 2019, it reveals the differences, from a human capital strategy perspective, between companies that had experienced high growth and those with marginal growth. It found that organisations with a commitment to innovating their culture and implementing flexible/mobile working initiatives tended to experience high growth in comparison to those that didn’t.
It also found that poor data management is something that is holding HR leaders back. Covering topics around internal protocols around data use, teaching people to use data responsibly, and the methods they use to share critical data, the survey shows how some organisations far ahead of others, and that the gap would only widen if companies s fail to address this issue, with 26 percent of HR leaders surveyed saying data would be less manageable in three years’ time.
The price of failing to keep up with the times will be HR departments that struggle to deliver basic functions as the volume of data, the demands of executives on reporting, and the demands of employees on modern and flexible working models, all increase unrelentingly
The gap in data proficiency is exemplified in the differing levels of data confidence between HR data leaders and business data leaders as a whole. As the whitepaper states, being a data leader leads to greater confidence in key deliverables.
“While still the majority, fewer from HR are highly confident in their organisation’s data security or their ability to generate meaningful insights from the data they collect. The gap between leaders and laggards is particularly apparent in this area. Implementing data management strategies and ensuring rigorous training on protocols is HR’s path to becoming a data leader, and in HR’s case, that path can lead to greater credibility within the business,” reads the paper.
It further states that: “The business is constantly demanding more from HR as a function. Yet with only a small minority of HR respondents classed as data leaders, their credibility is at stake in terms of being able to provide the necessary data and contextual insights that CEOs demand for the human capital functions."
Another challenge identified in the paper was the difficulty HR leaders face regarding agile workforces. Despite finding that organisations with significant growth were twice as likely to have completed agile talent initiatives, only 30 percent of respondents had implemented agile talent re-deployment initiatives and only 41 percent were investing in talent development.
The gap between desire and reality is huge – 73 percent of HR decisionmakers say that talent agility is a priority for their organisation
The surveys on which the results are reported were sent to managers, directors, vice-presidents and/or C-Level executives with influence in the decision-making process of cloud solutions, platforms, and infrastructure or department-specific software. All the respondents worked within organisations generating revenues between less than £1 million (approximately R23 million) to more than £500 million (approximately R11.7 billion) with 100 to 50,000 employees.
