The Portal Podcast Transcription – Episode 3 – Analytics in HR Management With Sayantani Pyne

Mr. Bhaskaran 

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A word that has become part of our lexicon is analytics. At its most fundamental level, it is using the abundance of data available today to understand situations better or to make more informed decisions. And a field that is increasingly using analytics is human resource management and that is the focus of our podcast today. 

I have with me Sayantani Pyne. She’s a senior Talent Analytics practitioner with Accenture Strategy and Consulting business. She has extensive experience in driving large-scale HR transformation, digitization, and HR Analytics projects. During the last 14 years of her career in HR, she has worked in areas of Workforce, analytics employee experience, total reward strategy, shared service operating model, HR process re-engineering amongst other things. She is an alumna of XLRI Jamshedpur and NIT Durgapur. Drawing from a vast experience in HR and her passion, for evidence-based, data-driven decision-making, she has promised to share her point of view with us today. 

Ma’am, it’s a privilege and a pleasure to be able to speak with you today. It’s not often that I get to talk to somebody with such accomplishments. Thank you for taking the time out to share your thoughts with our listeners today. And I would love to pick your brains on the topics of analytics in HR Management. 

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure too. Thank you for the opportunity.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

An obvious question that pops up in my mind comes from the old adage – “If one has a hammer, everything is a nail.” Are we trying to force-fit analytics into a field that is extremely and deeply human-centric? Do you think it is fair to use analytics in the area of talent transformation?  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Yes, absolutely! In fact, it has become a very integral part of today’s talent transformation. If I may quote  – World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, 85 million jobs maybe displaced by machines but 97 million new roles may also emerge due to the new imperative for people and technology to work together. Never has there been a more urgent need for an organization to think ahead and provide their people with resources to prepare for these new opportunities.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

So, this pops another question in my mind that the data is fantastic and I think that is what most bodies are talking about. How do you then think HR analytics can play a role in preparing talent for this future? Literally in the space of talent transformation.  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Yeah, so the opportunities are huge. If I can go step by step. So, starting with workforce planning and workforce planning can be short-term or long-term, a vendor and workflows, thoughtful planning a data-driven workforce planning, gives you a good understanding of what skills you have, what skills you need and when do you need them. And how do you, where do you get this?  

Similarly, for long term and that’s the real game you know, to really predict the future that what skills you will be really needing. So, once you do once you have an understanding then you need to figure out where will you get that talent from? So, the options are you, you will hire, you will train them internally, you can mobilize your talent internally and in Analytics terms, we call them build-buy-borrow framework. You can either hire them, you can either you had them temporarily train them which is building or you automate them. Right. So, this this entire picture is not possible without doing proper analytics on skills data and all the people data that you have right now.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

So, in the past, strategic workforce planning was initiated primarily by the experience of the leaders in the organization and they were predicting the future the way it is. Are you saying that we should augment that with analytics that prediction that analytics makes about future talent requirements?  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Of course, I think no analytics is successful without leaders and other experts giving their, you know, sharing their knowledge and sharing their views and also, you know, drawing on from their experience. So, analytics, helps you take decisions, but ultimately, it’s human who take decisions. That we have to continue. It’s just that our decisions are more data-driven evidence-based and there are not colored by our personal biases or understanding. 

Mr. Bhaskaran 

You also spoke about short-term and long-term needs. Is there a difference in approach between short-term workforce planning and long-term workforce planning?  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Yes, of course. Short term is you know, it is more descriptive. You have a lot of data. You have your reports. You have your MIS. You understand the trends and you come up with a short-term plan. The Strategic nature of long-term planning is deeper. You understand the market range, there are a lot of reports by, you know, For example, Gartner or any other research organization. They’re constantly figuring out where is the economy going? Where is the technology going? So, you need to bake in those insights as well. Plus, it’s about planning, it’s about you know understanding how will you meet your talent needs. Yeah.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

To do this, to be able to predict talent requirements in the future, what kind of data do you think an organization should have access to?  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Yeah, so they’re come, you know, you of course, you should have your strong internal data, you should have data like, you know, your Human Resources. You should have a very robust skill repository. And, you know, so that that will give you and of course that can be with the lenses of different kinds of roles, clusters, job levels, departments, and more. You should have a good skill repository. So, that’s the internal piece of anything. When it comes to external, you can understand where is the market going. What are, you know, what are other companies hiring? What are your competitors hiring? There could be some skills where, right now, one or two players, you know frontrunners are hiring but you will get an understanding from this kind of market scan. So that’s the other part of the data.  

And you know, this is just the data. There will be also derive layered on top of this data, right? Which will tell you the skill adjacency, which will tell you, you know, which two skills are very similar in nature so that, you know, person skilled in one skin can get very quickly trained on the other ones, right? So, those are the power of analytics. Once you have the right data in place, you can run analytics to drive full meaning out of this and the output of this can be used in your hiring decisions in your training decisions, your internal talent mobility decisions.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

Very interesting! Now, from a talent transformation perspective, you just introduced the word training. Do you think analytics or methods in analytics can be used in training as well? 

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Oh, yeah! And I can talk about this all day long. The impact of analytics in training is huge. And you know, it covers all aspects of training when it starts. Oh, you know, from simple things that whom  do you train and how do you train, what should be a training mechanism because different people learn things differently. So, it starts with that. It can give recommendations to individuals, understanding, what is their current skill set and what are the adjacent skill set and what are the demands of this skill set and how will they benefit. It can actually help them in their career growth.  

Then, you know, we can also understand why through analytics that how training is impacting the organization. What is the return on investment, you know, the training Expenses of your organization and you can derive value for CHROs and training heads. It is a very useful tool to understand the value they are creating and viz-a-viz the investments they’re making and then go and show the world or the CEOs to get more investment. So yeah, the impact of analytics and training is huge.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

Just as you advised us on the kind of data required for talent acquisition. Do you have a feel about the kind of data that makes sense, if you want to do analytics from a training perspective? What kind of data should an organization look at? 

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

So, you know, again, it goes back to what kind of business outlook they have. Where are they growing? Where do they need to grow? And you know, what is there in the market with skills they can easily buy, which is not easy to buy and they need to build? So yeah. So, it is a, you know, cross section of your talent profile, business insights, marketing insights and more. So, to have a holistic understanding, you should have all these different sets of data.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

This is very, very interesting right now. Obviously, this is not a simple task to undertake. But I want to build on that thought, you said. It is possible to understand the value that training brings using techniques of Analytics and this is of course a fantastic news for the L&D organizations, as well as the CHROs and the business folks. The value that organizations are been struggling with in terms of value that training can bring is that you see this value after a few months or a few quarters, right? So, I get trained today on a new technology, obviously, you begin to see the impact after 6 or 9 months. Would Analytics help me make more sense of that kind of requirement? RoI on training?   

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Oh, yes! And you know the RoI model can take a financial valuation route as well and that’s the power of, you know, analytics. It is driven by core mathematics and statistics and finance. And people, you know, practitioners talk these languages, it makes more sense. So, the ROI will show you your today’s investment, how it is bringing that cash flows and when is the break-even happening and when are you really getting your return. So, yeah, it’s model like any other evaluation model.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

Very interesting. Before I move to my next section, I have one closing question on data. Organizations obviously, and especially the bigger ones, have a lot of data with them but and we know that in the field of analytics the more the data the better. Do you have in your experience a benchmark for what amount of data an organization should be looking at? Is it two years? Is it five years? You know, what, were, and how should an organization begin this journey?  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

So, you are right, you know, data amount is definitely important but one thing we should not miss out is the data quality. This is because it’s junk-in-junk-out. If you do not have the right set of data and you know the right sort of integrated data today – today, you may have your people data but it could be just in silos. Your ability to derive value from that will be limited. You should have good people data. You should also have it integrated with your other systems like your finance system, your customer, you know, t relations management system and your other system transactional. So that you are not only getting just the people profile data, but you’re also understanding the human behaviors. I guess where we are still yet to mature is to get our basic database. Most companies have these databases where you have people data, their experience, their performance, the skills that they have and more. Where we need to really make that next, you know, take the next step and move to the next level is understand the interactions and the footprint, which, for example, our e-commerce sites, apps and other digital apps.  

They do it very well, right? They are just monitoring you as a customer so that they can add value. Similarly, we need to treat our employees as well. We need to understand our employees and, you know, through data and then we can do much more with that data.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

Thank you. So, this is not as simple as I thought it is. There is a lot more complexity to these whole analytics in HR than I thought it was. So, we have we spoken about what analytics is and we have spoken about the application of analytics in the space of HR. My last section is how to make it happen? HR, obviously, many, many, many HR folks are from a technical background. They have a feel for this. And yet, there are many, many HR folks who are not from a technical background. What then should HR as a function do to integrate analytics into their way of working? 

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Great, great question and I am sure, you know, a lot of organizations today are really thinking through this question. So, let me share what I feel. So, I think two, three things. Let me also address these questions from organization’s perspective and HR professionals perspective.  

So, when I look at organizations, I think they need to take small steps but, you know, high impact and important steps. So, the first thing is data, you know, your data you should have data. Today’s organizations, still do a lot of HR processes offline. The more and more you use systems, your data will be, you know, on system and you can use that data. So first is you can create a task force, whose objective will be to really map the entire employee life cycle and understand what data we have, what data we do not have and really take a wise decision.  

It’s not that you need a lot of data. So, sometimes, the cost of creating that data lake will be higher than, you know, the benefits you are going to get from that data. So, if you could engage with some data experts who have done it in some large organization, you will know which data you need and how do you create a good, you know, data, pool or data lake. T 

hen the second thing will be, you know, look at your low level, reports MIS Etc., because you need to first do that, you know? And we have a lot of HR analytics, maturity models today that are floating in the market. A lot of great companies have created so you can follow them. So, if you really look at it the base level, you have that data and the data quality, then you are just doing simple descriptive report – simple descriptive analytics.  

Once you’re comfortable with it, then you can do more integrated descriptive analysis, where it is not only HR data but it is data connected with your finance data, productivity data, you know, training data, and more. And you’re showing how the how it is related to you know the other parameters addressing the organization. Once you are comfortable with this then probably you can move to the whole predictive journey and running complex algorithms to predict things before they actually happen. 

And the last leg will be really to recommend that you know, if x y z, things happens what you need to do. But, but my suggestion is, you know, there are important areas which are which will create business impacts like, workforce planning, learning, hiring. We need to connect HR Analytics with business results.  

You know I feel as HR professionals, we have to work really closely with business and see that what people analytics area really helps the business to, you know, drive that their goals. If we run HR Analytics in silos, we will not win this battle.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

Extremely insightful. I love the statement that says this can’t be run as a silo by HR itself. Does this then also have an implication of existing HR processes? 

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Yeah, if you are asking me that if HR Analytics can improve HR processes, of course. You know, I mentioned sometime back that the human-machine interactions, right? More and more, you run your processes on systems, you have either integrated HR Analytics system or even you know you are running different processes in different systems, you are generating huge amount of data, right? When you mine that data, you understand the pattern in data, you know, for example, your performance management process, right. Most companies today have a system for running performance management process.  

So, if you understand that, you know how much time people are taking? So, there are two parts to this analytics. One is just the performance panagement, it could be rating. It could be who are your high performers? Who or what kind of training they need? How do you improve the overall performance? So I think many companies are doing it, but where we also have a lot of scope, is the whole behaviors, right? That am I setting goals? Am I finishing my Performance Management quickly or on time? Whether my manager is giving me feedback on time?  

And with all that, there’s a lot of culture and behavior part, you know, hidden in that. If we have capability to mind that I guess the kind of insights will be generating is really huge and very impactful.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

Does this also mean that HR has to build analytics expertise within its own function? Not by the HR people themselves, perhaps. But do they have to get a few colleagues who are experts in the area of analytics to make the best use of this?  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

You know, you can adopt multiple models for this and it is also based on how big you are as an organization, what kind of HR strength you have, what kind of data you have and more Irrespective of your scale, HR analytics is important for the organization. So, couple of models I can talk about. 

So let’s say you are, you are starting and you do not have, you know, a large HR function or capabilities. You can definitely seek help from external, you know, consultants Etc. Work on a few impactful projects, you know, show quick wins, and then start seek for that investment and build. Typically, the value that an HR professional can bring really is their domain understanding. 

I think any analytics project to do there are two parts. One is the deep Data Science, AI ML and analytics expertise, but the second part is domain expertise or functional expertise. You cannot really produce result and finish a project successfully without the domain.  

I think the domain guys can still do some, you know, analytics with their basic knowledge but just the Data Science people will not be able to produce impactful HR analytics result. So, so my suggestion to all HR professionals who are really interested in, you know, creating a career in HR and analytics or passionate about HR analytics, they should not feel any limited or shy away just because of their lack of Data Science skills. I think that skills, you can borrow, you can collaborate with other data scientist in the organization but what you are bringing is your overall people understanding, your people analytics understanding. And I think this collaboration is really beautiful and you know, it’s effective, it’s cost-effective and you can produce wonderful results.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

Thank you. Thank you. I think that is a fantastic way of looking at this issue because as an HR professional, it can get a little overwhelming if you say I have to start from scratch. And I have to build competence and so on, so forth. And I think this is a lovely via media. My last question before we wrap up, where do you think Data Science is on the journey of using analytics in HR? If you think of it as an S curve on the, at the beginning of the s-curve, are we kind of plateauing off? What is the level of maturity of this use usage?  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

In HR, definitely we are not plateauing. I think that because the opportunities are huge. I think the areas where we are HR analytics, got some maturity is hiring, a lot of hiring today is happening, you know, based on AI algorithms, where you are matching resumes, you are matching the skills, you’re identifying adjacent skills not only at the sourcing or screening stage, even in an interview stage, you know, a lot use of a lot of such tools and Technologies. We are using even things like background check, you know, where you can run algorithms to identify the probability of cases where probably the background check will fail. Yeah?  

So, I guess that area in HR is quite mature. Similarly, I think learning has also picked up pace with a lot of learning recommendations, learning analytics, Etc. But if you look at the other areas, right from workforce planning and you know performance management, talent decisions, total rewards decisions, a lot around, you know, bias-free talent processes, or bias-free hiring. In all these areas, you have a lot of opportunity and overall employee experience. Improving your employee experience, improving retention Etc. There’s a lot of opportunities.  

Definitely, we are just beginning the journey and there is a lot to achieve.  

Mr. Bhaskaran 

So, the good news for me is, I’m not too late. It’s fantastic here right now that I don’t want to be left behind so I’m not too late! That’s, that’s great. So, folks, there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth.  

We spoke about what analytics in the field of HR was. We talked about its applications in the area of talent transformation, both in talent acquisition and talent development. We spoke about the fact that perhaps the first step in this journey is to make sure that your data is in order. Make sure you have the right kind of data. It’s not about the quantity, it is about the quality, make sure that you’re capturing all the data that you can. If you still have HR processes and procedures that are analog in nature, convert them to digital as soon as you can. So that you start capturing even more data.  

We also spoke a little bit about how HR as a community can initiate this journey by partnering with other Data Science experts and Specialists within or outside the organization. And perhaps for yourself, as HR professionals to get a little bit of exposure to the domain, not to become algorithmic specialists, not to become analysts of your own but to get an exposure of what analytics means in the domain of HR.  

And last but not least, the icing on the cake is, we are not too late, the journey has just begun for the industry and we should get on board as soon as we can. Ms. Sayantani, it was a pleasure talking to you. A privilege personally. I learned a ton today from you. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. I hope we can touch base with you again, in the future.  

Ms. Sayantani Pyne 

Absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Bhaskaran so much. 

Mr. Bhaskaran 

 And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to the Portal. Before we sign off, let us remind you that the portal is powered by UNext. We have transformed companies from across diverse domains and helped them propelled towards growth and profitability through meticulously structured and customized programs for 360-degree work force transformation. We are bringing you more incredible conversations on emerging technologies. So, make sure you stay connected with us on major podcast streaming platforms like apple Spotify, Google podcasts, Amazon Music and more. Also, if your enterprise is looking to implement workforce transformation strategies, do reach out to us. You will find us to be the perfect partners.  

Till then, goodbye. 

*Outro Music*  

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