Democratising People Analytics with AI: Empowering HR Professionals for Success
The introduction of AI, including generative language models like ChatGPT, has brought about significant advancements in the field of HR. It is completely changing the HR landscape as we know it, helping HR professionals streamline their tasks and enhance their efforts and decision-making capabilities in areas such as L&D, recruitment, performance management, employee engagement, onboarding, and people analytics.
(Source: McKinsey & Company)
The potential of AI in HR is immense. As a result, we see an increasing adoption across all levels of HR. Though, despite the widespread industry recognition of AI's positive influence, a recent People Management LinkedIn poll, holding over 1000 votes, found that only 17% of HR professionals are using the generative AI technology of ChatGPT for HR tasks.
However, with data literacy being found to be a core skill for decision-makers; and with 2021 Insight222 People Analytics Trends research finding that 90% of CHROs place people analytics as an essential component of their HR strategies, it may be time to consider how AI technologies, including ChatGPT, can be better utilised in empowering HR teams across all levels and enable them to make more informed decisions.
After all, according to McKinsey & Co research, those organisations that invest in the automation of people analytics have the potential to see a total return to shareholders (TRS) of around 74% higher than their peers.
Breaking Down Barriers to Data Literacy
AI provides a new wave of data democratisation to people analytics insights, empowering HR professionals across all levels. Traditionally, the decision-making capabilities of HR teams have been limited due to a lack of data literacy. However, the playing field is levelling out with AI simplifying the process of data gathering, understanding, manipulation, presentation, and communication of insights for HR teams.
By leveraging generative AI models, HR professionals can now gain insights into their people's data without the need for deep statistical knowledge. However, HR must still upskill themselves in data analysis and interpretation. To ensure that insights produced are ethical and avoid any black box insights, they still need good data literacy. Instead, democratising insights with AI provides them with the opportunity to be able to access insights more easily.
For instance, many people analytics platform vendors turn to generative AI models like ChatGPT to produce natural language insights from their people data. This poses a great advantage to HR teams, allowing them to access insights and recommendations without needing to understand the underlying analytics or rely on busy analytics teams to interpret and analyze it for them.
Self-Service Analytics
As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic expresses on the Digital HR Leaders Podcast: "
Smart HR leaders need to find the answers by themselves and create the conditions where they can test what works in their companies and what doesn't."
This wasn't always realistic for businesses and those without a data science background. Before AI-powered people analytics, HR professionals must rely heavily on their in-house data science teams or external partners to interpret people analytics insights. However, this is no longer a requirement with AI's increasing availability and data democratisation within HR platforms.
Now HR has the opportunity to independently access insights from their data without needing assistance. And with AI in people analytics platforms holding ETL capabilities and predictive and prescriptive analytics, HR teams can now be more autonomous in their decision-making processes by self-serving the insights they need.
Tata Steel saw immense results from providing self-service analytics. You can read more about their story towards democratising people analytics insights here.
Real-Time Decision Making
One of the most significant benefits of democratising people analytics insights with AI is the ability to make real-time, data-driven decisions. With the ability to process large amounts of data and fast, AI-enabled people analytics platforms can now provide HR teams with accurate and immediate insights to aid their decision-making processes. Alerts can be configured to receive notifications when trends emerge, and dashboards can be built to enable real-time data visualisations.
For instance, if an employee engagement survey reveals a low score amongst specific demographics, AI-enabled people analytics platforms can immediately highlight this to HR teams and provide them with the insights for them to take the necessary action to address the issue.
Building Strategic Alliances
The overall effect of data democratisation with AI is the empowerment of HR. Not only does it allow them to make real-time, data-driven decisions, for example, but it also helps encourage a shift in mindset, leading to increased collaboration between HR and other departments.
By providing HR with the tools they need to understand and interpret their own people data, a level of expertise is developed that permits them to become real drivers of change in their organisations. This puts HR functions in a powerful position, allowing them to build strong strategic alliances with other departments and to be viewed as key advisors on a range of people-related topics across the business.
Enabling the Democratisation of People Analytics Insights
When correctly applied, AI's potential in HR can help democratise access to people analytics insights and empower HR professionals across all levels. Though as McKinsey highlights, for this to be successful, organisations need to
"fundamentally change their cultures into ones that embrace data, experimentation, and agile principles… They'll also need to develop tailored analytics-education programs for all levels of employees, redesign processes, source new technical talent, and revamp their technology architecture."
Through the right combination of technology, culture, and talent, AI can enable organisations to democratise people analytics insights further, empowering HR professionals to make data-driven decisions independently. This helps increase overall data literacy across organisations and provides them with the tools they need to become more agile and efficient in responding to changes within their workforce.
Ultimately, this shift towards data democratisation and the development of self-service analytics with AI has the potential to revolutionise how organisations manage their most important asset - their people.
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