Commvault’s Ramesh Kalanje on how data can be the new currency for HR leaders

Human Resources (HR) data is one of the most important assets for an HR team, as it can be utilised to improve decisions, make employees happier, and optimise processes, thus maximising business value and resiliency.

‘Data-Driven HR’ is the crux of all recruitment data, career progression data, training data, absenteeism figures, productivity data, personal development reviews, competency profiles, and staff satisfaction data, to name some of it.

In the current scenario of big data and analytics, more and more companies are turning their data into insights, such as predicting when employees will leave, where to recruit the most suitable candidates from, how to identify and attract those suitable candidates, and how to keep them happy once they become employees.

In an exclusive interaction, Ramesh Kalanje, Vice President, Center of Excellence, at intelligent data services platform Commvault tells People Matters how data is proving to be the new currency for HR leaders.

What potential does 'Data-Driven HR’ hold to transform the ambit of HR innovations?

With an ever-changing state of the business landscape, data-driven decision making is helping organisations achieve the golden standards of management and productivity worldwide.

According to IDC, the Global DataSphere is expected to more than double in size from 2022 to 2026. With data growing at a rapid pace across various industries, the HR department is now embracing digitalisation and data.

However, the potential of data in HR departments remains largely untapped as they struggle with data sprawl in their organisations.

As data flows in from various employee touch points within a company, successfully accessing, managing, leveraging, and transforming the right set of information throughout the organisation could be a gamechanger. The dynamic privacy landscape demands compliance with laws such as GDPR and Indian Data Protection Bill and in turn, requires HR departments to manage an employee’s data lifecycle. With effective data management and protection strategy in place, organisations can successfully deal with massive employee-data deluge while fending off malicious entities and cyber-attacks.

How can data help to ensure the overall wellbeing and effectiveness of the company’s employees?

As talent conundrums such as the great resignation, labour shortages, and employees’ changing demands have kicked in, the HR department has been forced to up its game.

Data-powered solutions have transformed the HR dashboard to better understand employees at every stage of their career lifecycle. It has aided in understanding the pulse of an organisation, analysing employee behaviour, and has the potential to completely transform employee assessment metrics.

According to NASSCOM’s Return to Workplace Survey, 40 per cent of employees plan to work from their workplaces just a few days per week while 83 per cent of companies plan to adopt a hybrid approach to work.

In such a scenario, data backed insights can help make business decisions without compromising employee sentiment, achieving an optimal balance between on-site and remote working environments.

A 360-degree understanding of your employees’ mindset is crucial to put the best practices in place.

For instance, at Commvault, we have our Employee Pulse Survey – an anonymous survey consisting of all the important questions across topics such as employees’ wellbeing, work-life balance, transparency, culture and so much more. These insights garnered by the survey have been extremely valuable in helping evolve our culture over the time.

While data makes the world more legible, what challenges have to be addressed to base true strategic decisions on it?

Data has evolved into the lifeblood of almost every business function. HR departments deal with sensitive personal data stored about their former, current and potential employees which can range from their name, social security number, address, date of birth, to their medical, financial, and other confidential information.

Every organisation today is dealing with the ‘Data’ problem. Having more or less data is not the big concern here. Not knowing about ALL of your organisational data is where the real problem lies.

Enterprises cannot manage what they don’t know they have, so having “Data about Data” is key to addressing this. So, if you’re looking for positive business outcomes, you need to know all your data across employee touchpoints – in the cloud, on-premises, stored virtually, on endpoint devices and everywhere in between.

Most of the organisations today only have a partial view of their data, which exposes them to data risks, leading to poor business efficiencies and unmet business goals. With a unified view of an organisation's data, analytics and AI tools can easily search, access, leverage relevant data to forecast business risks and help make strategic business decisions.

The ability to quickly access your organisational data, coupled with the ability to enrich those insights, presents significant opportunities for organisations to drive innovation across their HR practices and deliver successful outcomes.

How is Commvault building on its capability strategies to bolster talent intelligence?

With innovation being at the core of everything we do at Commvault, it is important that we apply this approach when it comes to attracting and retaining the best talent in the industry. We don’t just believe in hiring talent, we believe in a holistic talent development of the employee, which starts even before they join the company.

Our hiring processes are agile - from leveraging AI tools to personalise job recommendations and create optimised candidate experiences to increasing the probability of hiring the right fit for the role, we continue to create engaging hiring experiences with a personal touch in each step of the hiring process.

Today, employees want their roles to not only drive professional growth but also personal growth. Holistic performance evaluation tools are a great way to ensure both managers and employees are working together to establish right benchmarks, tracking goals, with employees’ having the right support for growth.

By analysing the massive volume of data generated by an employee’s activity, retention technologies help us track employee engagement levels and pinpoint the right gaps in employee satisfaction, providing an opportunity to address those issues early on and create more engaging employee experiences.

In the Commvault family, we ensure all our employees – from potential hires to new joiners to veterans, have an authentic Commvault experience whether they’re working in a physical, virtual or hybrid setup. In fact, as disruptors, we feel that it’s essentially our job to continuously introduce new innovations across the organisation to create exceptional employee experiences and attract the best talent in the industry.