Your business is able to optimize and adjust important HR and business strategies by relying on effective workforce analytics. By deploying a comprehensive, scalable, cloud-based workforce analytics solution, your HR department will be able to answer the following talent questions:

• Whom to hire?
• When to train or promote?
• What are the skills gaps?

The following best practices comprise the foundation for the delivery of insightful, actionable information that executive leadership demands; HR departments can accelerate and influence impactful business decision making with confidence.

1. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Senior business executives rely on HR departments to provide accurate, sophisticated, and insightful talent information — in a timely manner. With workforce analytics, HR departments deliver detailed and timely talent insights.

Many businesses have a landscape of complex and disparate HR and talent management systems, and also rely on unwieldy spreadsheets to manage sensitive data; workforce analytics systems help eliminate the compliance and security risks of relying on those spreadsheets and provide a unified and single source of business truth.

2. Challenge Assumptions
The most familiar way to hire, retain, and develop employees might not be what is best for your company. Use workforce analytics to challenge and change the internal biases for making talent decisions.

For example, many companies have adopted a strategy of promoting exclusively from internal candidate pools. However, your company could be missing external expertise. Workforce analytics can quantify the difference in performance between promoted leaders and recruited ones. Now, when a hiring manager automatically excludes candidates, HR departments will have the data to justify a better recruiting strategy.

3. Take on Business Challenges
With hyper-competitive global markets, there’s no shortage of business challenges. This increases the pressure to hire, develop, and retain the best talent to execute on business strategies. By leveraging a solution such as SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, you can effectively pinpoint resource issues and gaps — and deliver insights on how to solve those challenges.

4. Leverage Standard Industry Benchmarks
Use a cloud based solution built with industry metrics to measure the effectiveness and progression of your talent strategy.

5. Be Prepared
HR departments are now required to deliver actionable, meaningful insight in a variety of fast-moving business climates. Be aware of the following situations:

• Merger, acquisition, or divestiture activity
• Globalization and business-model transformations
• New business leadership changes
• Expansion or significant growth
• New product or service launches
• Efforts to improve customer satisfaction
• Changes in the regulatory environment

These situations require deeper, broader analysis and collaboration with other departments. Your business should use Workforce Analytics to develop and deliver insightful business cases. The result is that business leaders are now able to make the best-informed decisions possible.

6. Link Information to Business Outcomes
HR departments need to understand talent analytics and dynamics and convey the results to senior business leaders in effective and impactful ways. By evaluating and comparing the insights from your HR and talent management systems against finance, sales, and operations data, HR departments can help link talent decisions to business outcomes.

For instance, does an increase in voluntary turnover among customer-service representatives correlate with a decrease in customer retention? Does the turnover correlate with wages going up in key markets? By bridging together disparate data points in a cohesive manner, senior business leaders are more likely to accept and embrace your business and workforce recommendations. By deploying Workforce Analytics cloud-based solutions, HR departments are empowered to lead strategic business decisions; they can now leverage workforce analytics to augment talent and business strategies, while maximizing time to value with rapid implementation and deployment.