A white paper from Deloitte on the value of people analytics.

1. 0101
People analytics is transforming the
business currency of HR from checked
boxes to actionable insights. These insights
are adding value to every aspect of HR and
elevating the function’s role in the delivery of
business successes. They also are bringing
new responsibilities—chief among them,
ensuring the ethical use of this information
and compliance with regulatory standards.
Is it any wonder that 84 percent of the
business leaders and HR executives
surveyed in Deloitte’s 2018 Global Human
Capital Trends study cited people analytics
as important or very important?1
Minting the New Currency
of HR—Insights
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Introduction
Just a few years ago, HR was primarily viewed as a support
function—filling job openings, administering benefits
plans, and ensuring compliance. Today, HR is considered
a strategic adviser and works with management to drive
bottom-line results. The principal difference between HR
then and now: People analytics.
84%cited people
analytics as
important or
very important

2. Minting the New Currency of HR—Insights | People analytics insights will transform HR
0202
People analytics is an emerging and fast-
evolving technology. So it isn’t surprising
that Bersin research found that only 2
percent of HR organizations have a mature
people analytics capability.2
But that also
indicates there is a first-mover advantage
available to forward-thinking HR leaders.
They will be among the first to deliver more
engaging, analytics-powered HR offerings,
such as one-stop employee platforms,
which will improve and differentiate
the employee experience. These digital
platforms, including Deloitte’s ConnectMe,
provide employees with immediate access
to everything related to their employment,
wherever they are and whenever they want
it. They empower employees to manage
the logistics of their own work lives—and to
make faster, better choices, with the help of
automated services like recommendation
engines.
Analytics don’t just power platforms and
other digital tools; the granular insights they
offer into employee needs, desires, and
behaviors also inform and shape the design
of employee offerings, the structure of work,
and organizational culture. Thus, the applied
insights of people analytics can influence
employees’ behavior and drive up their
engagement, resulting in greater likelihood
of achieving strategic business objectives.
In a very tangible manner, people analytics
enable HR to adopt a more customer-
centric view of employees—the kind of view
that savvy marketers have of consumers.
Analytics allow HR to better understand how
employees work on their own and together,
to distinguish between different segments of
employees, and to discover what motivates
employees (and demotivates them), among
many other things. The business of HR has
always been people, but now, with the help
of analytics, a previously unobtainable view
and understanding of employees is possible.
The insights generated by people analytics
can be applied to every HR activity. Already,
recruiting is a top area of analytics focus
among companies, with performance
measurement, compensation and workforce
planning, learning, and retention following
closely behind.
People analytics will likely be used to
enhance the output and efficiency of a
variety of HR processes—improving job
offer acceptance rates, reducing HR help
tickets, and optimizing compensation. It
will help identify workforce competency
gaps, articulate the implications of different
hiring strategies, and identify those talent
characteristics that foster high performance.
And it will enable organizations to quantify
the cost and impact of HR processes and
programs, and surface insights that reduce
turnover costs, optimize training spend
per employee, and predict the ROI of HR
initiatives.
Already, recruiting is a top area of analytics focus
among companies, with performance measurement,
compensation and workforce planning, learning, and
retention following closely behind.
HR practitioners who are early adopters will
gain the advantage of more powerful people
management tools. Analytics-powered HR
dashboards, for example, feature “measures
that matter,” that is, metrics that support
business goals, objectives, and decisions,
such as job-fill rates and retention levels.
These metrics can be calculated in real-time,
allowing HR to act or intervene more quickly
and effectively. The traditional annual
employee satisfaction survey is positively
glacial in comparison to an automated
program of online pulse surveys whose
results pop up on HR dashboards or apps
that can be shared across the organization
as the surveys are completed.
People analytics insights
will transform HR

3. Minting the New Currency of HR—Insights | People analytics insights will transform HR
03
Today’s employees are used to a consumer-
grade, social media–like experience. As a
result, they have high expectations for their
employers. Fortunately, HR can leverage
people analytics to enhance the employee
experience. Insights can be gleaned by
examining data on many factors—how an
organization retains top employees, the
effectiveness of training programs, the
impact of an organizational structure, and
the interaction between employees and the
company, just to name a few.
Understandings in hand, an organization
can make better, more-informed decisions,
developing programming that impacts
employees throughout the life cycle—from
recruitment and onboarding, to learning
and performance management, to growth
opportunities and rewards. And eventually,
to separation or what Deloitte calls “being an
employee for life.”
By focusing on topics and challenges
that are important to their business
counterparts, HR organizations that
adopt people analytics will change the
nature of the relationship with those same
internal stakeholders. If, for example, a
company’s leadership team is concerned
about lagging revenues in one area of its
business possibly caused by extended time
to market, during the holiday season, HR
can use people analytics—analyzing time
spent, movements, performance, payroll
and more—to determine if productivity is
a factor given vacation and other year-end
commitments over the holiday season.
Those insights can help the business decide
whether an increase in staffing during future
holiday seasons could boost productivity
and sales. This might also impact leadership
decisions around engagement of existing
employees—are there programs in place
that keep employees happy and productive?
The good news? More and more
organizations are realizing that HR is not
the only function to benefit from people
analytics. Our research shows that more
than 70 percent of executives are making
strides to integrate data into everyday
decision-making processes.3
When HR is
able to quickly provide data-driven insights
and actionable recommendations to
address challenges that limit achievement
of strategic operating and financial results,
it will become a powerful, strategic ally
to the other business functions, and the
organization as a whole will benefit.
People analytics insights
will transform the way HR
interacts with the business
People analytics insights
will transform the way HR
interacts with employees
Over 70%
of executives are making
strides to integrate data
into everyday decision-
making processes.
More and more
organizations are
realizing that HR is not
the only function to
benefit from
people analytics.

4. Minting the New Currency of HR—Insights | People analytics insights will transform HR
04
Like all promises, the promise of people
analytics comes with a couple of non-
negotiable conditions. HR leaders who want
to capture the insights offered by people
analytics for their companies will have to
meet them.
One condition is the need to develop
analytics literacy among HR practitioners.
As people analytics become embedded
in the function, the ability to use them will
expand beyond the technical experts in the
core analytics team to practitioners across
the function. For example, HR professionals
will need to be able to use tools such
as organizational network analysis and
interaction analytics, which examine
employee behavior to better understand
opportunities for business improvement.
Analytics knowledge is going to be a critical
capability throughout HR with implications
on the HR operating model and career path
opportunities.
A second non-negotiable condition of the
people analytics promise is data integrity
and security. Data is the fuel needed to run
HR’s new insights engine, and it will flow into
HR from multiple “listening channels” both
inside and outside companies. Safeguarding
that flow is of paramount importance, yet
our research finds that just 22 percent of
executives have excellent safeguards to
protect employee data.4
To adapt, many
HR organizations will need to reconsider
and change how data is collected, stored,
and used. It will also mean adopting robust
policies to ensure that data security, use
transparency, and employee privacy is
maintained.
These conditions notwithstanding, the
promise of people analytics is too valuable
for HR organizations to pass up. To trade in
the new currency of insight, HR leaders will
need to stand up a mature people analytics
capability as soon as possible.
Insight quality depends on
analytics literacy and data integrity
CASE STUDY The challenge The result
The solution
Deloitte helps a
health system
use insights to
transform RN
turnover rates.
A regional health system with more than
40,000 employees was experiencing above-
average turnover of its nurses. The system
sought to better understand its nursing
workforce to predict and mitigate the
negative impact of future workforce trends.
Deloitte implemented advanced analytics
and data science to better understand
the drivers of turnover. This included
aggregating five years of workforce data
from multiple internal sources, segmenting
clinical units to better understand employee
movement, and deploying multiple machine
learning, statistical methods, and
alternative visual techniques to deliver
data-driven insights.
•• The discovery of previously unknown
drivers of turnover, including instances
where managers were not addressing
employee desires for alternative
assignments and departments with a large
span of control.
•• The creation of a predictive model
to identify employees at high risk for
resignation.
•• The development of targeted, fact-based
talent management solutions to address
turnover challenges.

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Copyright © 2018 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.
www.deloitte.com/connectme
Endnotes Contributors
1. 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends, “The rise of the social enterprise,” Deloitte Insights, 2018.
https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/human-capital-trends.html.
2. High-Impact People Analytics, Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP, 2017, www.bersin.com.
3. 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends, “The rise of the social enterprise,” Deloitte Insights, 2018.
https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/human-capital-trends.html.
4. Ibid.
Amel Arhab
Senior Manager
Deloitte Consulting LLP
aarhab@deloitte.com
David Fineman
Specialist Leader
Deloitte Consulting LLP
dfineman@deloitte.com