I’ve never been a fan of telling other people what to do, think or say. I find it arrogant and demeaning at both a personal and professional level, and aside from situations warranting it (e.g. your immediate safety), you quickly lose respect and credibility. In many ways HR reporting has committed this same offence. For some reason HR leaders continue to produce standard HR reports and dish these out at regular intervals to management and executives for examination and supposed insight into their business operations. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t met too many leaders or managers who are excitedly waiting for the next HR report to land on their desk or email in-box.

Standard HR reporting has reached retirement age, and should be put out to pasture. It’s a reactive way of looking at your business and people management, and has its roots in a time when HR had to spend hours and days collecting, fixing and consolidating information into spreadsheets before distributing a report that added little value. Managers don’t need a report to tell them they have 3 vacancies unfilled, or that it took 47 days to fill a position or that 7 appraisals are still outstanding. They know all of that before they get the report. Sadly I still see many HR functions fixated on producing their “monthly report”.

Most modern HR systems have dashboard, trend analysis and mini analytics that replace the need for Standard HR reporting. This is much more effective and removes the constraints (and arrogant assumptions) of standard reporting by offering line managers a choice of information to support their decision making, and more importantly, they get it immediately. At a minimum you should be providing this approach to managers.

This approach doesn’t however go far enough. If line managers don’t know what questions to ask or what data or information is relevant, they won’t get the best outcome. This shouldn’t be seen as a loophole for HR to get back into a telling mode, but rather an opportunity to define how information finds the line manager based on their people related and enterprise social on-line activity.

Its good to see some of the leading HR vendors moving into this space together with strong predictive analytic tool-sets. The algorithms behind these tools are complex, but also configurable to suit your environment and solutions. It does however require a significant rethink about decision making in general, not just related to HR information, but including the interplay between other internal and external data sources.

Check out my previous blog “Is WFM  the new HR?“