Leaders like yourself are discovering, after the shift in work culture in the post-pandemic era, that they are becoming more dependent on the effectiveness and the efficiency of their teams that work under them. This is great for digitally minded HR professionals and teams alike because of the opportunities they are being presented to provide more business value. But do your teams have the digital mindset to overcome the challenges of these new responsibilities? If not, it is time to shift their mindset to develop better data-driven decisions.

What Are the Factors That Impact Developing a Digital Mindset?

Though there is the understanding that data is becoming more important for businesses to remain competitive in a tight business market, the desire alone to implement data-driven decisions is not enough to get teams ready for a digital mindset. Many factors and challenges impact developing a digitally minded workplace.

What Are the Challenges Facing Developing a Digital Mindset?

First, there is the hesitation from leaders that feel they should know everything that is going on with their business and their teams. It was a common belief in the past that leaders should be experts in the industry and the functions of the business. But since the pandemic it became obvious with as many diverse teams as they were managing, leaders needed to step back and trust their teams and any outsider insight that is brought in.

Also, there are concerns from employees about their privacy and the potential misuse of their information. But transparency over data usage and how that information is being collected can have large benefits in persuading teams to a digital mindset. Also, advise employees that their interactions will be recorded but not the content of those interactions.

And lastly, there is the hesitation of employees to adopt changes. As observed by Dr Paul Leonardi, Professor at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of the book The Digital Mindset: What it takes to thrive in the age of Data, Algorithms, and AI, in a recent episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast:

“The thing that we both have noticed so often is that there’s a reluctancy amongst many people across the organisation to fully embrace a lot of the technology and data changes that are characteristic of the digital economy, because they say, “I’m just not sure what it means to be digital, and what skills do I have? I’m not a computer programmer, I don’t know how to code in Python or Ruby, and I don’t know how to run advanced multinomial models, so am I left in the dust.”

Here, utilising the 30% rule for digital fluency provides a counter to this barrier. The idea behind this, and HR and L&D can help employees with this, is that you don’t need to be 100% fluent in something to make use of it. For example, you do not need to understand the whole vocabulary of the English language to function. If you understand at least 30% of the vocabulary, you possess the ability to converse and be understood.

How Changing the Approach to Data Develops a Digital Mindset

As with most changes in business, the approach to the matter can have a strong drive to produce the desired results. Consider this:

Approach to Collaboration

Approach to collaboration - recognises that with interpersonal and social dynamics changing with the new reality of remote and distributed teams, there is going to be the need for employees to collaborate with AI-powered robots and bots as teammates due to not seeing people in person. 

Approach to Computation

Approach to computation - by grasping that data is not complicated and is a social product that is not just waiting to be uncovered but requires processes for the finding. While there are some skills you need to have to succeed in the digital age, which are quite attainable, you should also have an understanding of:

• How data is collected

• How data is categorised

• How data is stored

• How data is analysed

• What data is included and not

• What the implications for that are

Approached to Change

Approached to change - where there is the acknowledgement that the world is no longer what it was and is in a flux of change that is not going to stop anytime soon. Where technology advancements, customer needs, and data input is constantly bringing up new challenges and solutions to be explored and experimented with.

The Importance of Using a Relational Approach to Analytics to Improve Workforce Efficiency

To understand the relational approach is to understand that people analytics has two sides that can be explored to make improvements to human management. 

First are individual attributes, which look at the employee in terms of, how long have they worked for the company, how long they commute, how many teams have they been on, or how many performance reviews have they undergone. All of these are important for running good people analytics operations and making sense of employee behaviour and trends.

But to get the full picture of talent management is to also consider the relational attributes of an employee. Because much of how work gets done is accomplished through the interworking and relationships of employees with their peers, with their managers and with their teams. So, taking the relational approach simply means you think about the social capital of any employee in the organisation and the nature of the relationships they have with other employees.

The reason for this, as Dr Paul Leonardi stated:

“You’re trying to put together a taskforce or a team that’s going to tackle a really key challenge within the organisation. We need that team to get up to speed really quickly, they need to interact flawlessly with one another, they also need to pull in lots of unique information from different parts of the organisation to make their decision. We can use relational analytics to identify that optimal team structure.”

The Opportunity for Organisations to Invest in Future-learning Technology

With the major change that came after the winter of 2020 when there was the shift from transactional work to remote work, people were doing all aspects of their work through digital platforms.

These tools assist with extracting data, creating data models, running structural signatures, and managerial issues such as how they can take the insight from the analyses and put them to use. They record and create metadata out of every interaction that occurs and gives HR practitioners a dataset that helps drive understanding and insights into employee behaviour. 

But companies will need to invest in training their people. With all the opportunities these tools will provide, they will also create change that needs to be kept up with. Dr Paul reiterates:

“I think the imperative for companies though, moving forward, is going to be providing some of that essential training inhouse where we know that our employees need it en masse, but also making sure that we have budgeted in time in our employees’ schedules for them to be doing the kind of learning that maybe happens outside the organisation, and supporting that. Whether that’s supporting that with some kinds of tuition reimbursement or PTO to be able to attend these sessions, today’s good organisations need to recognise that making an investment in employee learning is essential to not only getting them to that 30% but helping them to stay there.”

How HR Can Add Business Value as We Start to Transition Out of the Pandemic

With the changes in the world of work, if HR professionals are not taking the initiative and joining the conversation with c-suites and business leaders, they need to be. CHROs, HRBPs and people analytics leaders can offer a wide range of value to businesses as they make the transition. HR can advise and guide in strategic methods to get teams started in a digital mindset as well as be the champions of that change, providing communication to all stakeholders about the benefits of data-driven decisions. They can also deliver clear insight into the effectiveness of the current efforts through continued collection and analysis of human capital data. All this, however, depends on fully understanding your role as a leader in highlighting the importance of delivering a data-driven culture.

It is time HR and People Analytics professionals create a partnership with business leaders and prove they contribute true value to organisations. If they currently do not have the skills to feel confident to take their seat, they should consider investing in upskilling to build a more data-driven culture. There are numerous popular HR & People Analytics resources for themselves and their teams that can drive a more robust digital mindset and create digitally minded, business focused and experienced leads.

Upskill your HR Team today!

We help organisations reinvent learning. Our learning programs support your HR Business Partners to build the skills they need to effectively use analytics in HR to have data driven conversations with the business that drive actionable outcomes. The Data Driven HR Fundamentals certification is a collection of 6 on-demand, video based training courses that can be completed within a 12 month period, at their own pace. This certification program is designed to support your team build their skills in analytical thinking, data analytics and storytelling. By completing this learning program your HR team will learn how to better interpret HR data and be confident in having data driven conversations with the business, that drive actionable outcomes.