Traditionally, HR has been seen as a function driven by intuition and experience. However, in today’s business environment, data and logic guide workforce decisions. Over the years, organizations have increasingly relied on change readiness surveys, dashboards, and engagement reports to gain insights into their people. Yet, despite generating and understanding these insights, meaningful action often fails to follow.
This raises a fundamental question: Why does People Analytics struggle to drive real impact?
The Challenges in People Analytics
- Dual Priorities: People Analytics aims to improve employee performance and support business goals simultaneously—a balancing act that can be difficult. For example, remote work might boost overall employee satisfaction but leave some leaders sceptical about productivity.
- Human Behaviour is Unpredictable: People aren’t programmable. Decisions and motivations shift for countless reasons—from a milestone promotion to starting a family—making it tough to forecast or categorize.
- External Change is Constant: Global events such as wars, layoffs, lockdowns, and shifts in work models disrupt even the best-laid plans.
- Market Saturation: The HR tech space is flooded with tools, each offering new features daily. The focus on the new often outweighs attention on what truly matters. AI is often introduced without addressing fundamental issues, adding complexity instead of clarity.
- Data Literacy Gap: While tools get more sophisticated, many users lack the analytical skills to interpret and act on these insights—especially when black-box models are involved.
- Overemphasis on Insights: More and more tools today seem to be focused on ‘Insight’ as the holy grail. Tools are designed to deliver insights that are both surprising and aligned with our expectations – an impossible outcome! Also, many teams hesitate to act on data for fear of making mistakes—or simply lack the processes to do so.
The Current State of People Analytics
Today, most People Analytics models follow the sequence:
Despite good intentions, most People Analytics efforts end up producing insights that look impressive on screen but rarely translate into action. HR leaders can feel frustrated and disconnected when all that hard work doesn’t yield tangible outcomes.
What Needs to Change?
I believe we need to adjust the focus at both ends of the People Analytics journey—the start and the end:
- Start with Data Cleaning: Ensure data accuracy and relevance at the source to build a solid foundation. Organisations spend inordinate time in data cleaning, but what is the cost (time, effort, opportunity) that it takes to maintain data integrity. Are we sacrificing more than we should?
- End with Actioning: Insights should be the starting line for action, not the finish line. We need to prioritize follow-through and measure the real impact of each decision.
Enter Talenode
People Analytics is only as strong as the quality of data behind it. Without accurate, complete, and timely data, even the most advanced analytics tools fail to deliver actionable insights. This is where Talenode comes in.
As HR's first no-code data quality and observability platform, Talenode ensures that every insight generated is backed by clean, validated, and decision-ready data. By tackling data accuracy at the source, Talenode bridges the gap between insights and action, enabling HR teams to make confident, data-driven decisions.
Our mission is simple: “We Nurture Data, You Nurture Talent.”
People Analytics should empower HR teams to drive business impact, not firefight bad data. Talenode is redefining the way organizations manage and trust their HR data because clean, reliable data is the key to smarter workforce decisions.