HR Analytics, Fad or Fashion
for Organizational Sustainability
Tahir Masood Qureshi
Abstract
HR analytics is becoming more and more important over
the years. Understanding how to work with the data is
paramount to the success of an organization working in
the competitive business world. The largest expense of
many companies is on human resources, starting from
sourcing, recruiting, training, retaining till end of service.
Therefore, it is essential to know how HR decisions
impact business performance by linking HR practices to
business outcomes and using meaningful information
instead of gut feelings. For this purpose, HR analytics can
help companies know what they need to improve the
work process performance. It can help them to form a
high-performance team and maintain good working
environment and predict exactly which candidates are
likely to exceed. However, the major challenge for the
companies is to find out the right person who can work
with HR data and perform analytics in a right and
meaningful way. Few companies using HR data analytics
are not taking it seriously because they think that it is just
another product added in the company’s soft assets, but
few are using it properly to make data-driven decisions.
Using five-point Likert scale questionnaire, 273 responses
from HR professionals working in GCC automobile
industry were collected and analyzed using SPSS.
Analysis revealed that HR analytics used properly to
generate reports that help organizational executives to run
routine operations and HR-related strategic matters is
contributing significantly toward organizational sustainability. Furthermore, organizations’ readiness to use HR
analytics and human capital mediates relationship
between HR analytics and organizational sustainability,
which creates learning.
Keywords
HR analytics Á Organizational sustainability Á Human
capital Á HRM
1 Introduction
Organizations are struggling to shift from operational
reporting to analytics despite having huge interest in human
resource (HR) analytics and vast data availability. However,
few organizations appreciating such growth have struggled
to move toward HR analytics through development of people models and statistical analysis for actionable solutions
based on facts (Bersin 2015). Therefore, many organizations
have yet to grow their analytical capabilities. There are many
business intelligence (BI) software that help companies to
gain insight on their overall growth. BI products available in
the market enable organizations to capture, categorize, and
analyze corporate data and extract best practices for
improved decision-making. Like other business functions for
human resource field, HR analytics—referred to as people
analytics or talent analytics based on different models of
statistics and mathematics—is used to develop talent management related policies and strategies for improving sustainable organizational performance. HR analytics is a
process of HR data recording, mining, analysis, visualization, and planning for better performance.
Many researchers and practitioners are lamenting the lack
of analytical skills among HR professionals and organizations’ readiness to use the human resource analytics
(ORHRA). HR professionals are responsible for developing
and implementing HR planning for the current and future
matters related with human resource management, while HR
data analysis is essential activity of HR data scientists and
has a high demand in the world. These professionals are
responsible to develop a logical story based on HR data
analysis but based on certain logic. The simplest way is
calculating correlation among different HR functions to
T. M. Qureshi (&)
American University in the Emirates, Dubai, United Arab
Emirates
e-mail: tahir.masood@aue.ae
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
M. Mateev and J. Nightingale (eds.), Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility—Volume 1,
Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32922-8_9
103
for Organizational Sustainability
Tahir Masood Qureshi
Abstract
HR analytics is becoming more and more important over
the years. Understanding how to work with the data is
paramount to the success of an organization working in
the competitive business world. The largest expense of
many companies is on human resources, starting from
sourcing, recruiting, training, retaining till end of service.
Therefore, it is essential to know how HR decisions
impact business performance by linking HR practices to
business outcomes and using meaningful information
instead of gut feelings. For this purpose, HR analytics can
help companies know what they need to improve the
work process performance. It can help them to form a
high-performance team and maintain good working
environment and predict exactly which candidates are
likely to exceed. However, the major challenge for the
companies is to find out the right person who can work
with HR data and perform analytics in a right and
meaningful way. Few companies using HR data analytics
are not taking it seriously because they think that it is just
another product added in the company’s soft assets, but
few are using it properly to make data-driven decisions.
Using five-point Likert scale questionnaire, 273 responses
from HR professionals working in GCC automobile
industry were collected and analyzed using SPSS.
Analysis revealed that HR analytics used properly to
generate reports that help organizational executives to run
routine operations and HR-related strategic matters is
contributing significantly toward organizational sustainability. Furthermore, organizations’ readiness to use HR
analytics and human capital mediates relationship
between HR analytics and organizational sustainability,
which creates learning.
Keywords
HR analytics Á Organizational sustainability Á Human
capital Á HRM
1 Introduction
Organizations are struggling to shift from operational
reporting to analytics despite having huge interest in human
resource (HR) analytics and vast data availability. However,
few organizations appreciating such growth have struggled
to move toward HR analytics through development of people models and statistical analysis for actionable solutions
based on facts (Bersin 2015). Therefore, many organizations
have yet to grow their analytical capabilities. There are many
business intelligence (BI) software that help companies to
gain insight on their overall growth. BI products available in
the market enable organizations to capture, categorize, and
analyze corporate data and extract best practices for
improved decision-making. Like other business functions for
human resource field, HR analytics—referred to as people
analytics or talent analytics based on different models of
statistics and mathematics—is used to develop talent management related policies and strategies for improving sustainable organizational performance. HR analytics is a
process of HR data recording, mining, analysis, visualization, and planning for better performance.
Many researchers and practitioners are lamenting the lack
of analytical skills among HR professionals and organizations’ readiness to use the human resource analytics
(ORHRA). HR professionals are responsible for developing
and implementing HR planning for the current and future
matters related with human resource management, while HR
data analysis is essential activity of HR data scientists and
has a high demand in the world. These professionals are
responsible to develop a logical story based on HR data
analysis but based on certain logic. The simplest way is
calculating correlation among different HR functions to
T. M. Qureshi (&)
American University in the Emirates, Dubai, United Arab
Emirates
e-mail: tahir.masood@aue.ae
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
M. Mateev and J. Nightingale (eds.), Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility—Volume 1,
Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32922-8_9
103