How does your HR Analytics function compare to the 2020 Benchmarks?

Posted 21 days ago

Over the next year the HR Analytics ThinkTank - a partnership between 3n Strategy, the University of Leeds and Utah State University - is expanding its scope of research. Led by myself, our academic leads @Andy Charlwood and @Mike Ulrich, and guided by our industry leading board of practitioners, we will be exploring career paths in the industry, techniques and decision-making.

Before we were able to explore these new and exciting aspects of the people and HR analytics industry however, the ThinkTank's focus was on analysing HR analytics functions and industry trends. Since 2015, HR analytics leaders in our community have been letting us track their journeys and the growth of the industry overall.

Last month we launched the 2020 Benchmark figures - a unique set of data points that track the growth of the industry, the strengths and weaknesses of functions, and more. The full report will be published next month.

What types of questions can the 2020 Benchmarking figures help you answer?

From a high-level industry perspective:

• Is the overall industry getting stronger?
• Are different regions stronger than others?
• What types of data are HR analytics functions around the world working with?

As the Head of an HR Analytics function, or its sponsor:

• How does my function compare to the industry?
• Compared to functions of similar ages, is my function developing at the right speed?
• How does our function compare to functions that create predictive/prescriptive* value?
• What could my function be doing to develop more effectively to meet our business needs?

For functions building a business case for growth:

• How should we expect our function to grow - and what investments do we need, based on industry insights?
• At what time in our business plan do we need to justify hiring data science skill sets?
• At what time do we need to invest in different HR tools? What is the impact of not having them?
• Are there areas of HR that we could be investing in sooner to demonstrate value sooner, based on other functions?

For the die hard HR analytics obsessives there are more trends in the data around leadership, adoption, technology and more - If you want to read more about these, you will need to read more about the ThinkTank.

Next Step: Want to compare your function with the 2020 benchmarks?
All these insights are available for free to anyone who has taken part in the benchmarking. If you have taken part in the past and would like to compare your results with the 2020 benchmark set, you should receive an email from me soon. If you have not taken part and would like to contribute to the 2021 data set (and be compared with the 2020 set), please complete this form.

*The ThinkTank has not fully validated all maturity self-assessments yet.