Future readiness is the ability to scale up capabilities relevant to future competition and being resilient in an unpredictable environment, according to HBR. While CHROs and HR leaders struggle to hire, engage and retain top talent today, a silent epidemic is slowly taking root in the business world: a lack of future-ready leaders adept at thriving despite challenges and uncertainties. To build this army of next-generation leaders, we must apply innovative solutions and strategies that leverage new-age technology, data analytics and artificial intelligence. In this article, we explore how using people analytics can be an integral part of developing a pool of future-ready leaders: 

Building diverse and talented teams

Finding the right people is the first strategic step in building future leaders and managers. People analytics can help CHROs hire diverse, inclusive, qualified talent by significantly reducing bias. By analysing successful employees’ characteristics, qualifications, skills and abilities, hiring managers can improve the recruitment process to source the most relevant candidates, ask pertinent interview questions and search for talent in the most effective pools. Predictive analytics can also help optimise the hiring process by shortlisting applicants who better fit the role and organisation. It can also aid in identifying critical roles, setting KPIs and managing succession plans.

People analytics can help organisations and HR leaders understand what kind of people they desire and how to engage them best. It can also play a crucial role in enhancing the candidate experience and ensuring that you attract top talent. With accurate and reliable data, you can also forecast future talent needs and build strategies to develop a sustained talent pipeline. Additionally, data-driven decision-making can expedite an individual’s journey to productivity by streamlining the onboarding and assimilation process. Akrivia HCM’s Talent Suite can help you undertake recruitment marketing, candidate relationship management and bulk recruitment while offering valuable recruitment insights through visual dashboards, predictive analytics and business intelligence reports.

Enhancing performance management and leadership development

People analytics can make performance management and employee monitoring processes more dynamic and agile. Data-driven performance management can result in more objective evaluations, improve their accuracy and identify areas of improvement. Another critical benefit of using people analytics in performance management is the availability of enhanced monitoring tools that directly correlate with the role’s KPI and organisational expectations. By closely monitoring performance and having access to real-time data, HR and team managers can get better insights into every employee’s professional life and results. People analytics can provide managers with valuable metadata and trends for each team member, which is even more critical in a remote or hybrid work setting. 

Performance tools can also make recognising high-performing and high-potential employees easier for further leadership training and focused development. Performance management tools, such as Akrivia HCM’s Performance Suite, can help set individual and team goals, ensure timely feedback and track employee progress. The suite also offers a 360-degree feedback system and ready-to-use performance analytics report that helps monitor performance, set KPIs, and align initiatives with organisational goals. This crucial data regarding employee performance, productivity and engagement can help CHROs craft effective learning programmes that target existing skills gaps and deliver training most engagingly.

Improving employee engagement and retention

People analytics can make identifying workforce patterns and trends easier, indicating what results in higher engagement, retention, productivity and success. Organisations that recognise the factors correlating to higher performance and engagement are better placed to develop an environment where employees can thrive. Armed with insights into how the workforce behaves, organisations can identify employees at risk of leaving and find redressal mechanisms to improve their experience. Using tools to track engagement can also make benchmark scores easier and measure new policies’ impact. Furthermore, people analytics can enable measuring personalised employee experiences to identify what drives individuals and help managers cultivate a more meaningful and purposeful work culture for team members.

Proactively solving people’s challenges can address retention challenges and help organisations understand why employees choose to leave the workplace. Influencing these outcomes becomes easier if clear linkages and correlations between different factors are identified correctly. Timely interventions based on people analytics can help improve job satisfaction, offer desirable perquisites and provide additional support that can curb attrition significantly. For example, Akrivia HCM’s Engagement Suite can help you design a digital workspace that supports collaboration, interaction, innovation and holistic well-being by offering accurate insights based on employee drivers, sentiment, scores, and responses.

Enhancing workforce planning and encouraging lateral mobility

Workforce planning includes all aspects of talent management, including analysing, auditing, forecasting and managing people shortages, skills and hiring activities. People analytics can bolster workforce planning by providing a data-driven approach towards employee redeployment, succession planning, staffing budgets and reducing people risk. Strong people analytical tools can enable CHROs to revise staffing needs, identify skill gaps and scale recruitment operations as dictated by business requirements. A key benefit of using insights from data to manage talent is ensuring that employees work as per their abilities and strengths and, more importantly, live up to their potential. Data-driven decision-making can also enable freer movement of talent laterally as people’s skills are more likely to come to the fore and be utilised more effectively.

Preparing leaders for the future: The last word

To build the future of work, we need capable, talented and agile leaders who will lead organisations through complex challenges and unforeseen disruptions. Having the right set of tools to recognise and develop future leadership is essential for CHROs to make sound decisions. Furthermore, people analytics can provide overarching talent trends, patterns and vulnerabilities to help make timely corrective actions and interventions. Get in touch with Akrivia HCM to find out how you can use smart people analytics to identify and nurture the leaders of tomorrow.