Why is Consulting a Must-Have Skill for People Analytics?
For People Analytics teams to be successful, they must focus on the needs of the business. As Piyush Mathur, Global Head of Workforce Analytics at Johnson & Johnson, describes it in an episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast
‘Insight without outcome is overhead’.
The Insight222 Operating Model for People Analytics recommends a Demand Engine of consultants who work directly with business executives to provide a funnel of the most important business (not just HR) challenges and opportunities.
Research carried out by Insight222 in 2020 found that 52% of the companies surveyed intend to grow the number of people they have in the consulting role over the next 18-24 months.
In this article, I’m going to explore the Demand Engine and the consultant role in more detail, by answering the following questions:
1. Why is the Consultant role important for People Analytics to deliver business value?
2. What Skills does the People Analytics Consultant have?
3. How does the Consultant support the People Analytics Leader in developing skills across the team?
4. What does the future hold for the Consultant role?
Why is the Consultant role important for People Analytics to deliver business value?
Consultants in the Demand Engine are responsible for understanding and prioritising work that the people analytics team should deliver in order to drive value for the business. Consultants act as a bridge between HR and business leaders, and the technical expertise within the Solution Engine. Without the Demand Engine, the people analytics team can end up being focused on work that it believes is important or interesting without delivering value where the business needs it most. Even worse, the team risks undertaking work that is not implemented and does not resonate with business or HR leaders.
Consultants utilise a range of skills to:
Understand the business challenges and translate demand from business and HR leaders into people analytics projects
Frame business questions and define hypotheses for the people analytics team to translate into analysis and action
Communicate and manage stakeholders throughout analytics projects
Ensure that the products that the Solution Engine develop are relevant to the business and its needs
Analyse and present insights to key stakeholders to help inform, influence, support, and enable talent decisions
Work with the Product Engine to scale solutions and identify potential business units and/or countries to pilot and test analytical products
The consulting team (Demand Engine) is typically the entry point for business and HR leaders to the people analytics team. The consultants play a critical role as ‘brand ambassadors’ for the people analytics team and support the people analytics leader by building the team’s credibility with key stakeholders across the organisation. The consultants will need to build strong relationships with HR Business Partners and positively influence them to ‘open doors’ for the people analytics team into the business. This partnership with HR Business Partners enables the consulting team to identify business challenges that people analytics can solve and build strong stakeholder relationships with business leaders.
What Skills does the People Analytics Consultant have?
The skills that the consultant needs to be successful include:
Business acumen and domain knowledge, such as HR and people strategy
Stakeholder management, with the ability to build relationships and influence senior HR and business leaders
Curiosity and an entrepreneurial mindset
Strong communication skills, including active listening skills and storytelling
Translating business problems into hypotheses for the people analytics team to test
Analytical and technical fluency, or a desire to acquire it, to be effective in communicating with data analysts and data scientists
A challenge People Analytics leaders often face is where to source the skills required for the consultant role. Internally, the HR Business Partner community may provide a talent pool: accomplished and analytically minded HR Business Partners will possess the business understanding, HR domain knowledge and will bring pre-existing relationships with business and HR leaders into the people analytics team, which will help connect the team with key stakeholders. Externally, consultants at large and/or specialist consultancies with experience in HR transformation or people analytics can be expected to possess well-honed stakeholder management, influencing and communication skills.
In a previous role, I was asked to set up the consulting capability within the people analytics team. Initially, I looked internally within the organisation when hiring the team. Having joined the people analytics team from HR Business Partnering, I knew that there were individuals in the function that were analytically minded and possessed a deep understanding of HR and the business they were supporting. Pro-active conversations with these individuals resulted in a number of these people joining the consulting team.
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The team was initially set up with three internal consultants aligned to areas where the business had already requested support from people analytics. These early partnerships were used to demonstrate ‘proof of value' for the consultant role and provide the business case for further growth. As the people analytics team became more successful and demand grew, so too did the need for consultants. I made further internal hires from the talent development team, acquiring domain knowledge in diversity and inclusion and talent strategy into people analytics, as well as high potential graduates completing the HR graduate program.
This internal expertise was later supplemented with external hires bringing in consulting skills from large consulting firms. The team evolved to have a senior consulting leader and team aligned to each business area, partnering closely with the HR Business Partners. Consultants were also aligned to the centres of excellence, such as diversity and inclusion, talent development and talent acquisition to support the HR leader with their program needs.
How does the Consultant support the People Analytics Leader in developing skills across the team?
It is well documented that the analytics translator is the must-have role, and this definitely applies to people analytics. The consultant will be amongst those in the people analytics team that possess these translation skills. In the early stages of the people analytics transformation journey, the consultant will help to develop the skillset of the people analytics team in business acumen and user centred design. Rather than focusing on requirements that the people analytics team believe to be important, the consultant partners with the business and HR leaders so that the needs of the ‘customer’ directly shape the products and solutions that the people analytics team provides. This is often a significant shift for people analytics teams that have not previously had a Demand Engine in place. The consultant plays an important role in supporting the people analytics leader with this change in the capability of the people analytics team.
Don’t wait to hire the Consultant role!
People Analytics leaders sometimes feel that their team needs to be more advanced before hiring the consultant role. A people analytics leader at a large financial services organisation prioritised hiring a people analytics consulting leader within his first six months in the role. This people analytics leader recognised that in order to transform the function and ensure that it delivered business value, the team needed a consulting leader in place with the skills to:
Understand key business challenges that people analytics could solve
Build strong relationships with senior HR and business leaders
Act as the ‘voice of the customer,’ and translate their needs back into the Solutions Engine.
Shortly after joining the team, the consulting leader interviewed over 50 HR and business stakeholders to gather and prioritise requirements for a self-service dashboard solution. The aim of this solution was to answer key business questions about the workforce and reduce the manual reporting overhead on the team. The dashboard solution was scaled to over 2,000 users across HR and the business. It succeeded where previous attempts by the people analytics team had failed, because it was designed based on HR and business requirements. These requirements were understood and prioritised by the consulting leader, whilst communicating directly with stakeholders throughout the project and iterating the design of the product based on their feedback. The savings from reducing manual reports from 3,000 to less than 600 were used to fund the build out of an advanced analytics team. The consultant role would go on to become a key driver in the transformation of that people analytics team and the self-service dashboard was one of the foundational enablers in building a data-driven HR function.
What does the future hold for the Consultant role?
Eventually there may not be a need for the consultant role in people analytics teams and in advanced data-driven organisations, the Data-Driven HR Business Partner might fulfil the requirements of the Demand Engine within the People Analytics Operating model. At Capital One, talent from the consulting team has been exported into HR Business Partnering with the benefit of growing the individual’s career and starting to develop HR as well. For organisations on the multi-year transformation journey to create a data-driven and digital culture in HR, the people analytics consultant is a critical role to ensure the people analytics team delivers business value for the organisation.
Interested in learning more about Insight222’s research? Click below to read the full report: Delivering Value at Scale: A New Operating Model for People Analytics
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Naomi is currently the Director for Insight222's People Analytics Program®. This unique program develops the knowledge and skills of People Analytics leaders and their teams to increase value, impact and focus through bundled learning, networking and advisory solutions. Prior to joining Insight222, Naomi built out and led the People Analytics Consulting team at Barclays. She has also held roles in HR Business Partner teams and in Reward.