Making metrics matter

How powerful analytics can help HR make strategic decisions more easily.
HR Magazine spoke with Florence Cheung, Vice President, Human Resources, Wharf T&T to get her take on the challenges currently facing HR. She explains how rapid decisions, based on meaningful metrics, can help make HR more successful business partners and drive the bottom line.
Florence Cheung is no stranger to organisational development and formulating critical HR strategies, through her numerous HR management roles in multinationals. Responsible for looking after diverse workforces from around the world she has a self-confessed passion for the people business and the ever-changing challenges it throws up, in terms of acquiring, motivating and developing talents in the people industry.

In her current role as Vice President, Human Resources, Wharf T&T she is responsible for overseeing the full spectrum of HR functions in HK and China and plays a leading role in the development of HRMS for the organisation. So what makes Cheung so popular with the CEO? In every project she rolls out, Cheung designs features that integrate best HR practices in order to drive maximum returns on human capital investment.
Key challenges
Cheung notes that currently, many staff have high expectations in terms of C&B packages and that this is putting HR under pressure to increase salaries. She noted the need to strike a balance between staff engagement and human capital costs. Managing diversity, is another challenge facing HR as staff from different backgrounds, cultures and age-groups usually have different values, job expectations and job motives. Cheung pointed out that new generations in the workforce tend to desire more opportunities for learning, personal development and job satisfaction, as well as fairness, transparency and communication. To help address these needs, she believes it is important to set good benchmarks in terms of work-life balance, or work-life integration—as many now refer to it. She said, “We have adopted ‘family-care’ and ‘paternity’ leave and shortened general working hours to promote better work-life integration. In the IT sector, we are facing particularly intensive competition in talent acquisition. It is therefore essential that we adopt more focused HR strategies, such as this initiative, in order to continue to attract talented candidates that at the same time help retain knowledgeable and experienced staff.”
All change…next stop HR
Cheung has seen a dynamic shift in HR roles over the last ten years. “We have evolved from experts in HR administration to change agents who engineer the entire organisation’s development and cultivate positive corporate values in all staff.” Modern HR plays a much greater role than it used to, and rather than simply following decisions is now a strategic business partner to an organisation’s management team. Cheung pointed to four key drivers behind this change.
Increased human capital value: driving higher investment in human capital management. As organisations are putting increasing resources into fostering staff engagement and development, HR now takes a more proactive role in formulating respective strategies in this regard.
Employment ordinance and legislative changes: amid growing concerns on labour rights and benefits in recent years, a number of new employment ordinances have been introduced such as the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, Equal Opportunities, MPF and MWO in which HR serves as a professional consultant for employees and management team to ensure legal compliance.
New forms of remuneration: salary, bonus and double-pay are no longer the only forms of remuneration in today’s HRM. With higher education levels and growing competition in the jobmarket, job satisfaction and other intrinsic rewards like recognition and empowerment are also valued by employees—especially for Gen-Y staff.
Talent management: it is now more important than ever to ensure an adequate talent supply. For effective succession planning and to maintain a stable talent pool, HR needs to review, evaluate and forecast competency levels of existing staff and identify the skills needed for different positions that may arise.
Getting strategic
To be effective, HR needs to be basing strategic decisions on fact-based analytics, according to Cheung. This involves cross-dimensional analysis on HR data to provide a valid, comprehensive and reliable reflection and overview of current HR practices within the organisation. From this, HR can then formulate effective strategies to empower their workforce.
Cheung advised those in HR to observe patterns across multi-disciplines like turnover rate, reason for leaving, absence rates and job satisfaction levels to help uncover any hidden issues that may threaten the talent supply of an organisation. The observed patterns also allow HR to visualise and forecast trends of human capital development—allowing them to take preventive measures in good time, before problems surface.
In all cases, HR must react quickly and be decisive in adjusting their strategies to cope with rapidly changing business plans and market trends. Citing the example of the MWO, Cheung noted how growing concerns over labour rights had resulted in new employment regulations and the impact this had had on HR.
Cheung explained, “This means that to ensure legal compliance, whilst controlling human capital costs and maintaining the competitiveness of their workforce, HR must be now able to demonstrate quick analysis on the possible impacts to the human capital—so that they can work out instant but well-planned workforce strategies at all times.” She added, “The thirst for talent in today’s business environment has posed new risks to talent supply in every organisation. HR must propose the timely and most appropriate measures to the management team to ensure sufficient talent supply for smooth business operation at times of talent excess or shortage.”
Analytics that actually help HR
A good analytics tool enables HR to demonstrate in-depth, cross-dimensional analysis on a full spectrum of areas so that they can make timely, well-informed HRM decisions. Besides powerful analysing capabilities, it is also important that such tools provide easy-to-use functionality and graphical views so that even the most non-tech-savvy user can generate, and perhaps more importantly, understand relevant data.
DecisionHR is one such analytical tool which has recently been developed by Wharf T&T’s IT services subsidiary: COL . The tool enables comprehensive analytics on the following:
Human capital facts: enterprise-level data including headcount, recruiting, turnover and absenteeism—to help evaluate the health and wellness of the organisation.
Human capital investment: HR data including employee satisfaction rate, retention rate, productivity and effectiveness—to understand, measure and manage which actions have the greatest impact on business performance.
HR data by segments: insight into specific departments/functions—to identify areas for improvement.
Workforce forecasts: historical HR data including turnover, business opportunity data and staffing costs—to identify potential shortages/excesses of key capabilities, knowledge management risk and overall labour availability.
Talent value: analysis of performance data and job satisfaction levels—to develop personalised performance incentives, assess competitiveness of current offers and to decide which staff should be promoted.
Talent supply chain: ‘what if’ scenarios can be visualised with hypothetical HR data, e.g. predicting the volume and workforce needed and individual’s performance pattern to help make real-time decisions about talent demand and supply.
Through the timely use of such data analysis, HR should be able to put themselves in a much stronger position to demonstrate the direct impact of employee data on a wide range of critical business outcomes including: company growth, headcount trends, compensation distribution, turnover analysis, payroll forecasting, talent retention and absence/leave distribution.