Effective workforce reporting: Improving people data for business leaders

1. Start with the question: Outside of mandatory or ‘hygiene factor’ reporting, people reporting should not be a goal in itself. It needs to answer a broader question to add value. Think of the role of reporting as a way to stimulate debate on people matters among the executive committee or at board level. What are the people issues that sit behind the business issues that the wider executive team or board are interested in?
2. Think "less data, more narrative": In the words of one HR leader, the profession needs to “be better than the flat stats”. Narrative is what allows for action and a full systems-thinking approach to people data. Think about the interconnectedness of most areas of people management and development. The data might not always tell the whole story – for example, absenteeism figures reducing could be seen as a positive until you realise that issues related to stress and presenteeism, such as conflict, have increased.
3. Consider how the information helps achieve your organisational goals: Information to senior management and the board must demonstrate clearly how the people strategy and approach helps to achieve the broader organisational priorities.
4. Think about how to translate people information into commercial impact and business outcomes: Often the easiest data to gather covers the baseline (or hygiene) factors, but the work of the HR leadership team is to turn elements into a commercial conversation, connected to business performance and predictability.
   
   For example, look at the cost per employee or the financial impact of attrition compared with recruitment costs. Can you demonstrate the cost per employee of turnover through the time and cost of recruitment, the loss of productivity through absence and the cost of onboarding and training? Turning people information into cash impact can help drive investment in employee initiatives that will promote retention and elevate the whole discussion. 
5. Educate and challenge other leaders on people insight: This might be guiding them to think about what matters when, linking people matters to long-term strategy and organisational success or failure (for instance, the risk of not having enough skills in the right area), and advising on how to interpret and analyse people data. 
6. Avoid creating ‘busy work’ around data if it doesn’t produce actionable insights for the business: Think about creating a case for the data that matters and where to focus efforts, especially if you are resource-poor. The HR leader should be the curator of people data. Collecting the right data is a routine process: it is choosing what to elevate to leadership and board level that requires accountability and the most focus. Facilitate discussions with stakeholders about the people information they would find most useful for decision-making.
7. Be clear on why you are collecting the data – and transparent about the story it tells: Don’t fall into the trap of ‘slicing and dicing’ to explain something away for senior stakeholders. Instead, use the data to better understand the issue and address it. Data should not be used only to tell the story we want it to. 
8. Bring in external context and benchmarking data: The state of the labour market nationally and locally will often be material to conversations about both the business and the workforce. Board members want to know how things are comparable. How does this compare with what is happening in the market? What is the right number or scale for your organisation by comparison? The comparator is often what makes data meaningful. 
9. Challenge ‘data-obsessed’ executives where appropriate: Just because you can measure something doesn’t always necessarily mean you should. If you have a problem, it is unlikely to be solved by another dashboard. Instead, get to the heart of the issue that needs to be solved, and then think what data is needed to solve it. Always ask: “What will we do with that information?”
10. Use information to enable HR to initiate conversations about the trade-offs in the business: Can it be used to debunk organisational myths? For example, can analysing data around a problem help other leaders to see how the problem they thought they had is actually something different and therefore requires a different solution?
11. Be aware that people data usually only has to be “accurate enough”: It is not as black and white as financial data, so only needs to be accurate enough to build a compelling narrative around it. 
12. Don’t get overwhelmed: With so much talk in the media and on conference stages around AI, it can feel difficult to even start, particularly with a small team and limited resources. However, sometimes it’s the little things that can make a big difference. One successful demonstration of the impact of looking at people data can provide leverage for more investment in the HR systems to enable further reporting.

Context: Equiniti is a global outsourcing organisation that provides financial services support to businesses, with more than 6,000 employees worldwide. 

People reporting at Equiniti

Chief people officer Andrew Stephenson reports people matters to the executive committee every month, with a ‘people’ deep dive every six months. The board has a human capital committee rather than a remuneration committee. This committee has a quarterly agenda focused on the ‘people health of the organisation’ and a non-executive director has responsibility for this area. Members of the ExCo and non-executive directors are encouraged to attend colleague forums and Equiniti’s global diversity council. (“We have decision-makers embedded in the processes by which we collect data,” says Stephenson.)

Key areas of reporting include:

• labour stability (more so than turnover)
• employee engagement (Gallup and the Top Employers Institute present results to the ExCo and board annually, and Glassdoor data is reported monthly)
• gender and ethnicity pay gaps
• internal moves and promotions
• salary distribution (spans and layers)
• ‘hygiene factor’ metrics around health and safety, whistleblowing and so on. 

Stephenson is clear that it’s the alignment of strategy and reporting that matters. “Strategy and measurement are linked together”, he says. “It’s not a case of ‘What can we report on? Let’s tell you that.’ It’s: ‘Here is our people strategy. What are the measures that are relevant and how do we bring data and analytics that adds value to that conversation? What are we trying to achieve and what can we measure to check we are on track?’”

He prefers to talk about stability (the retention rate of experienced employees) rather than turnover. “Turnover is in our reporting pack as it’s easy, but we don’t talk about it as much because, these days, people move between jobs more often, particularly in frontline roles. It’s more about labour stability and are we keeping good levels of knowledge in the organisation, and having high engagement while people are here. It’s making sure you have the data that supports your plan, not getting hung up on the things that people think you should have.” 

The focus on stability led to Equiniti reviewing its internal recruitment processes, prioritising internal candidates with clear windows where roles were not advertised externally, and key jobs highlighted to all colleagues in newsletters each week. This led to a doubling of internal promotions during 2022, keeping talent in the organisation that may have moved elsewhere.

Stephenson believes the purpose of people reporting is to stimulate debate and find the right questions to ask. “There are bits of the HR world that need to be uber-precise, such as payroll, but, in many cases, you need the data to be good enough to point you in the right direction. That exploration in itself is useful to the business.” 

Context: NatWest Group is a British banking group with more than 59,000 employees.

People reporting at NatWest

When it comes to reporting, first think about the goal in mind, says Rosemary Byde, head of colleague data and analytics. It could be business-as-usual reporting for managers, mandatory reporting to meet regulatory requirements, or reports to support senior leaders in strategic decision-making. As Byde puts it: “A report is nothing without thinking: 'What can, or will, you do with it?'”

While NatWest aims to be as efficient as possible in business-as-usual reporting for managers and enables self-service through the people system (Workday), reports for the executive committee and boards are necessarily more bespoke.

Key people metrics include:

• talent acquisition, turnover (including internal mobility) and headcount (related to cost) (reported weekly/monthly)
• equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) (aligned to external reporting, reported quarterly)
• learning, absence, reward and colleague listening (reported monthly/half-yearly).

‘Systems thinking’ is critical, helping the team to ask the right questions and think about the potential outcomes of decisions. “Sometimes reporting triggers more questions,” says Byde. “With attrition, for example, we need to know more about what is driving it. You need to get into a conversation about it and construct a narrative. It’s easy to run a report and say: ‘This has gone up by 0.2%’, but you need to understand the drivers. Great reporting is not just another dashboard.”

Also important is the ability to turn people data into a financial conversation, which can require a shift in HR mindsets. While this can seem overwhelming, Byde reassures that it doesn’t have to be, using the example of turnover: “You can use external research on the cost of turnover to get a quick guide. Even without detailed or bespoke measurement, the most conservative estimates inform a multimillion-pound business case. You only need to be accurate enough.”

Another easy win when it comes to quantifying people matters is the cost of sickness due to stress (through sick pay and lost time). However, Byde points out the more powerful analysis is then using this data to understand the root cause of sickness and build a more preventative strategy that focuses on caring for the individual.

One recent example of how Byde’s team has used people data to influence strategy is around high turnover. While drilling down by location, role and business unit added nuance, the most value added was beyond the report, digging into the difference between internal and external turnover. It found that people were developing rather than leaving, leading to a strategic decision to introduce guidelines on how long new starters should stay in role before moving on internally. “It’s a good example of how what is good for one area of the bank is a potential problem for another area,” says Byde. “How do you manage the tension between the two? We are challenging assumptions and helping inform solutions.”