‘Workforce analytics can provide powerful insights for employee retention’

Suryanarayan Iyer is the director for human capital management solutions and is also responsible for Oracle India's HCM cloud strategy, in particular growth of Oracle Fusion HCM/Taleo in India. Prior to this, Iyer held the position of director for applications sales consulting for Oracle India. Oracle helps organizations connect performance metrics with financial and operational plans and embed analytics into core business processes. Workforce analytics involves modeling data (both qualitative and quantitative) to understand the past, present, and future drivers of organizational performance. It informs what tools and processes the organization should put in place to achieve its highest potential. In today's difficult economic environment, workforce analytics play an increasingly important role in addressing strategic human capital challenges. In an interview with Dataquest, Iyer shares his views on the evolving scenario of workforce analytics, key HCM challenges, enterprise 2.0 capabilities, etc. Excerpts

What are the major factors that are driving the workforce analytics market?
In today's competitive business environment, effectively managing the workforce has become a mission-critical objective. Organizations must be able to assess the impact of the workforce on their current operations and determine what changes are needed to meet future business objectives. The ability to quickly assess current and historical performance is crucial to meeting organizational goals. To fully understand how workforce factors affect the business requires timely and integrated insight from HR and operational systems across the enterprise. However, most organizations struggle to obtain this. The reasons are twofold. First, there has been an explosion in both the volume and complexity of enterprise data, which is often fragmented across many disparate transactional systems and departments. Secondly, the traditional business intelligence (BI) systems used by many organizations to analyze this data does not deliver the information to executives and front-line managers when and where it has the greatest impact.
In India, organizations are in an evolutionary stage as far as adopting workforce analytics technologies is concerned. As organizations face challenges to gather the necessary data to accurately forecast workforce demand, the need for retaining and attracting talent to meet current and future business requirements has created a strong demand for implementing workforce analytics.
Please share an example of Oracle's solution that has helped organizations with workforce management.
More and more organizations are seeking a proactive role in maximizing the productivity and effectiveness of various assets. For example, Oracle's PeopleSoft Workforce Scorecard helps in providing the strategy management and performance tracking needed to measure the effectiveness of HR initiatives. PeopleSoft Workforce Scorecard
helps organizations evaluate and communicate company performance, staffing, turnover, HR readiness, compensation, and competencies.
Highlight the key HCM challenges that can be effectively addressed with the help of these solutions.
The lack of user-friendly reporting and analytical capabilities has been a frustrating shortcoming of HCM solutions over the years. Organizations are implementing Workforce Analytics as it plays a crucial role in addressing many of the Human Capital Management issues they face today. One of the main HCM challenges is lack of requisite knowledge and skills needed to execute the business strategy. Secondly, Organizations should have retention and training plans to keep the employees highly motivated and engaged. Thirdly, Limited capacity to consistently measure and analyze workforce performance. Organizations should identify the performance gaps that exist and differentiate
high performers from low performers, compensate and reward these individuals accordingly.
Retention continues to be a major problem. How can analytics help tackle this issue?
To maintain high levels of employee satisfaction and retention, organizations must be able to quickly and effectively identify gaps that exist in an organization. HR heads should have a firm understanding of the skills and knowledge they have in-house and should be able to differentiate between high and low performers. Analytics provides organizations with powerful insight that enables them to analyze all aspects of employee retention. The solution provides best-practice metrics, alerts, and key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling companies to take targeted action to improve employee productivity.
Please elaborate on Enterprise 2.0 capabilities and how workforce analytics can be integrated with them.
Enterprises today are seeking new communication technologies, such as wikis, blogs, and forums, to improve communication and collaboration and increase employee productivity. Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 solution provides an integrated platform- combining highly scalable servers, next-generation storage, and networking technologies with best-of-breed software and services to deploy a highly reliable Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure that delivers simplicity, speed, and savings. Using Enterprise 2.0, organizations can improve the ease and transparency of their knowledge
sharing activities which, in turn, enhances effectiveness. The power of disciplined collaboration and the use of social networking are woven into the fabric of Oracle Fusion Talent Management. Enterprise 2.0 capabilities such as chat and group workspaces are available throughout the system to connect people, processes, and content to facilitate
effective team work. In addition, Oracle Fusion Talent Management includes two unique modules, ie, Oracle Fusion Network at Work and Oracle Fusion Talent Review, which provide a fresh approach to effective collaboration and social networking.
Considering that data analytics itself is at a very nascent stage in India, how do you see the market for workforce analytics evolving here?
Workforce analytics has become quite the hot topic in the HR technology arena as it provides the ideal platform to prepare HR to truly contribute toward business for the future. Today, the need for effective analyses and plans for future workforce have become critical for every company. In future, workforce analytics will be used to a great degree to assist HR heads in managing employee performance and for strategic business planning. Companies need to manage their workforce as a strategic asset, compensating and utilizing the workforce to achieve the highest levels of productivity and ensuring the organization meets revenue and profitability targets.