Human resources analytics can provide businesses the keys to improving processes, reducing workforce costs and making the right policy changes to improve efficiency. Leaders in the space and speakers from the upcoming Workforce and HR Analytics Summit West 2015 conference from companies like Visa, Wells Fargo, PepsiCo say the best place to start is to turn analytics into insightful action through business understanding.

Developing business insights and aligning HR analytics to core business operations largely rests on the shoulders of HR leadership. The key to a successful start is their relationship with other business units to understand challenges and target analysis toward solving those concerns.

Our thought leaders stressed the importance of developing a full picture of HR and noted that the success of analytics requires a specific set of actions:

• Build relationships in your business. Initiatives will struggle to show value unless you develop strong relationships with business units, project leads and internal customers.
• Ensure that HR has a place at the table. HR analytics can provide support for future roadmaps and ongoing projects, but its leadership must take a proactive role and demonstrate its strategic importance to other stakeholders.
• Match metrics to leadership’s definition of success. HR should answer questions posed by senior leadership to show the benefit of the investment analytics requires. Analytics builds credibility by resolving tough issues from leadership, even if they’re the least-interesting questions.
• Deliver results to establish value. If you are consistently delivering value to your organization, you will be included in discussions current business challenges and objectives.
• Follow the money. Analytics has to solve real business issues that impact the bottom line, especially in terms of workforce efficiency and productivity.
• Validate, validate, validate! The meaning of data must be clear for there to be any success through analytics. This requires a workforce that has a deep knowledge of HR issues and a mastery of data science and statistics.

Proper support begins before any analysis by having leaders work closely with other business units to understand their challenges and priorities. Understanding gives validity to analytics because it provides context for metrics’ efficacy,   thresholds and measures of success.

Read the full insights from our speakers.