HR analytics has never been more important. Organisations have more workforce data than ever before, and HR teams, people analytics specialists, and OD practitioners routinely track metrics such as turnover, absenteeism, recruitment, engagement, learning, mobility, and performance. To name a few. Yet having more data does not necessarily mean having a better understanding of the organisation.
HR & Capability Analytics asks a more fundamental question: what should HR and people analytics actually help organisations understand?
Moving beyond the familiar formula-and-dashboard view of analytics, Patrick Duffy presents analytics as a disciplined process of organisational inquiry, one that moves from counting and reporting towards understanding the conditions in which people and organisations actually work and perform.
The book introduces a practical analytical taxonomy built around three domains: Administrative Metrics, People Indicators, and Organisational Conditions. It then places particular attention on how administrative metrics and people indicators interact with the work, or conditions. Otherwise, metrics do not tell any story because they are not connected to anything. The book does this by integrating HR/people metrics with workload and organisation capability, thereby providing something tangible to say about the workplace and organisational conditions.
The book demonstrates how familiar HR metrics can be brought together with workload and capability conditions to support deeper organisational diagnosis, identify patterns of pressure and risk, establish priorities, examine trends, and develop forward-looking insight. This provides leaders, boards and decision-makers with something to use rather than a disparate mix of metrics with now story.
Along the way, readers will find practical guidance on measurement definition, quantitative methods, statistical essentials, workload analysis, capability assessment, workforce analytics, predictive analytics, dashboards, executive storytelling, and analytics project design. Extensive appendices provide HR metric inventories, spreadsheet guidance, statistical references, workload methods, metric specification sheets, and capability profiling templates.
Written for HR leaders, people analytics professionals, organisational development practitioners, workforce planners, consultants, strategy professionals, and business leaders, this book is for practitioners who want to move beyond collecting metrics and start understanding what those metrics mean for the organisation as a working and performing system.
Better analytics is not about producing more numbers. It is about understanding organisations better.
