HR data is a potential goldmine of information that can enable you to make more informed decisions about your organisation. However, it can be challenging for HR departments to navigate so much data to understand which numbers are significant and how they relate back, especially for large companies. To garner the most from your HR data, you need to know how to identify the meaning of each piece of information and what it tells you about your company. HR data visualisation is a technique for presenting data in a way that helps to quickly understand its significance and meaning. When you know how to identify the meaning of your HR data, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the information it contains to drive more informed business decisions.
This article will walk you through an introduction to HR data visualisation and explain why it’s so important when working with HR data.
What is HR Data Visualisation?
HR data visualisation transforms your raw HR data into visual representations that will help you interpret and put it to good use. HR data visualisations are specifically designed to highlight the important details and make it easier to understand the nuance of your data and critical data correlations. When visualising your data, you’re turning vast numbers into a pictorial that supports you to answer important questions. These visualisations enable effective collaboration across all departments and stakeholders to drive faster and more informed workforce decisions. Carried out well, HR data visualisations deliver meaningful and actionable reports for management.
Knowing How to Read Your HR Data is Key
Before you start visualising data and making sense of it all, it’s essential to understand what each piece of information means. This will help you know exactly what to look for when visualising your data. There are many different types of HR data ranging from employee personnel information, position details, and numerous quantitative and qualitative measures, including talent data, competencies, budgets, headcount metrics, employee surveys, projects/tasks, and future planning. Understanding what these numbers represent will help you make sense of them, how they may correlate to each other, and identify the meaning of your data.
Do’s and Don’ts of HR Data Visualisation
There are several guidelines you should follow when visualising your data, and these will allow you to create compelling visualisations that communicate the meaning of your data clearly and concisely. Here are some essential things to keep in mind:
Keep your data as clean as possible. Before you start visualising your data, you need to make sure it’s as accurate as possible in your HR system of record and any other data sources that may be used for ATS, payroll, contingent workforce, etc. Ensuring data quality will make it easier to visualise and communicate the meaning of your data with a higher degree of confidence.
Drive towards the correct conclusions. Ensure that a proper correlation exists between the data points you consider avoiding wrongful decisions. For example, when determining potential employee flight risk, gather the proper HR data points to help measure predictive factors, such as tenure, performance rating, retirement eligibility, relative pay scale, advancement opportunities, past employee exit surveys, and more.
Ingentis org.manager provides HR data visualisation to measure potential talent flight risk based on four key factors: Job Tenure, Performance History, Pay Range, and Retirement Eligibility.
Keep your visuals simple. HR data visualisation is all about making the complex easy to understand. Having too many visuals or too much complexity will only make it more challenging to understand your data. Your visualisations should include key performance indicators (KPIs) defined and understood by your organisation to help uncover and quantify key trends. This will allow a company, for example, to identify problem areas that need to be addressed quickly.
Benefits of Using HR Data Visualisation
HR data visualisation can help you make better business decisions. It can also support employees in understanding how their work contributes to the company achieving its goals, and it can facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. Visualising the data is also elementary to answering important business questions such as the demographics of your workforce, their core competencies, diversity within the workforce, the number of open positions and how many are critical, whether they are permanent or seasonal, or who is considered a top performer. Having all this data in front of you allows you, for example, to mitigate the flight risk and control managing spans, the layers and budget overage more effectively.
Dynamic Org Charts – The Optimum Solution for HR Data Visualisation
Since org charts are the most common visualisation method used in HR data, it’s the best example of how visualisation can make your data more accessible. An org chart is a visual representation of your organisational structure. It shows the different departments in your company, the people who work in those departments, and the relationships between them. Plus, they make it easy to understand the relationship between different data types and quickly identify any issues that may exist. Org charts are a great visualisation tool for your HR data because they can contain a variety of KPIs and metrics at a glance to help drive informed business decisions. For example, headcounts and vacancies can be displayed directly in the org chart, thus providing a quick overview of departments where vacancies need to be filled.
Ingentis org.manager Drives Effective HR Data Visualisations
As a recognized leader in providing data-rich org charting, facilitating org design activities, and people analytics, Ingentis org.manager uses the production data maintained in the HR system and additional data sources to visualise your organisational structure. The data visualisations created can depict hierarchy in different designs, dashboards, and diagrams (e.g., sunburst graph).
With Ingentis org.manager, one can make well-founded decisions through simulations. In addition to providing HR data visualisation to measure and identify possible courses of action, Ingentis org.manager can simulate (What-if) structural changes based on the current situation. Simple drag-and-drop facilitates objects being easily added, deleted, or changed and moved to other locations in the org structure. Key metrics directly impacted by changes will update with a simple click. In this way, the impact of planning can be evaluated and discussed before execution. The organisational design process is simplified and accelerated using such a dynamic tool.
Bottom Line
Ingentis org.manager is a valuable tool to help you make better business decisions through HR data visualisations. It’s essential to understand what each piece of data represents and how it relates to other numbers to make the most of your data visualisations. When you know how to identify the meaning of your data, you’ll be able to benefit from these HR data visualisations to help drive more informed business decisions. You’ll also be able to communicate your data much more effectively, which will help you collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders and make your data truly meaningful.
Want to learn more? Visit our website at www.ingentis.com/products/org-manager-suite
Steve Jenkins, with over 15 years’ experience within the HR Technology arena, leads the Ingentis business across the Middle Eastern region as well as managing the UK. His experience covers the areas of Recruiting, Contingent Workforce Management, Talent Management, Workforce Planning and HR Analytics solutions. More recently, Steve has dedicated his energies to the field of dynamic Org Charting solutions. Empowering organisations to gain a deeper visualisation of their most important asset – their people, which in turn enables the business to become more nimble with transformation projects, dealing with rapidly changing scenarios and building more agile organisations to deal with the future challenges that will face businesses in years to come.
Source: Ingentis
