Data helps give HR a seat at the table, yet many teams are underutilising analytics. But these companies are leveraging advanced people analytics to anticipate problems and drive business success. 

By Simon Kent

If there’s one thing HR is not lacking, it’s data. People processes, administration, and the concurrent swathes of technology across the function means there are plenty of facts and figures readily available to track diverse people activities and the impact these activities have. This data gives access to identifiable trends across the company—everything from time to hire to productivity, training effectiveness, and competency.

But despite this, is HR still missing a trick? Does the need to be “human” end up compromising the value HR can drive from the data it has? Could there be more to gain from analytics, both from a business point of view and the operation of HR itself?

According to Italy-based Alessandro Bonatti, chief people officer at group travel company WeRoad, data plays a crucial part in the decisions HR makes. As a company currently experiencing hyper growth, the stakes are high with the impact of every people decision amplified across the business. “A missed engagement signal can fracture the strong culture we’ve spent years building,” he notes.

Bonatti and his team consider data from the entire employee lifecycle including:

• time-to-hire;
• offer acceptance rates;
• early engagement scores;
• performance and development trajectories;
• internal moves; and
• attrition.

“We layer this with qualitative signals,” he explains, “pulse survey themes, exit interview sentiment, and the informal intelligence that comes from being a company where people genuinely talk to each other.”

By treating the data intentionally, Bonatti says HR can start identifying patterns before they become problems. “When attrition clusters around a particular tenure band or team, you investigate before it becomes a crisis,” he says. “Data sharpens human judgement.”

Eddy Massaad, founder of steak house chain Swiss Butter, who is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, says that while his business doesn’t run a traditional HR department, they still rely heavily on structured people data to guide leadership and organisational decisions.

The business tracks a number of people trends which inform subsequent actions. For example, one area they look at is succession readiness, whether a leader is operating at roughly 80% of the next role while simultaneously developing someone beneath them to cover 80% of their current one. “This is not theoretical,” asserts Massaad, “it is mapped against defined responsibilities, documented role scopes, and transition timelines. If either side is missing, progression pauses. That data shapes promotions and prevents personality driven advancement.”

“A people team that arrives at the leadership table with metrics tied to business performance is an HR team that gets listened to. For us, the shift has been from reporting what happened, to explaining why it happened and predicting what comes next. That is the difference between HR as an administrative function and a people function as a genuine strategic partner. Analytics is the bridge.” – Alessandro Bonatti

The second category the company covers is behavioural performance linked to customer outcomes. The business runs a guest satisfaction index which consolidates data streams such as mystery shopper audits, structured incident reporting, net promoter scores, public review sentiment, and direct guest feedback. This effectively connects leadership behaviour and training quality to measurable shifts in customer experience. Another area is what Massaad terms as escalation and delegation data. “Using structured responsibility frameworks, we track who owns decisions, who approves them, and where bottlenecks occur,” he says. “If certain decisions repeatedly escalate to the same individual, that signals a structural weakness in leadership design. That becomes a development conversation, not a blame exercise.”

This tracking of data means there is greater clarity around people management in the business. Massaad says promotions are shown to be less political and feedback is less emotional. “Development becomes measurable,” he says. “Managers are assessed not only on output but on whether they are building capability underneath them.”

Swiss Butter’s use of analytics goes beyond simply monitoring dashboards and reporting trends. Massaad describes them as instruments for behavioural alignment: They can be used proactively to create a more efficient organisation where people are more productive and work together more coherently.

Indeed Bonatti believes data can earn HR additional status, but he does qualify this. “Data earns HR a seat at the table only when it’s connected to business outcomes,” he says. “A people team that arrives at the leadership table with metrics tied to business performance is an HR team that gets listened to. For us, the shift has been from reporting what happened, to explaining why it happened and predicting what comes next. That is the difference between HR as an administrative function and a people function as a genuine strategic partner. Analytics is the bridge.”

According to L&D company Attensi, analytics around training programmes is being used beyond meeting KPIs to impact HR strategy and more across the business. Information and data around areas such as staff retention, customer experience, productivity, and reduced time to competence can all be measured and impacted. “When HR can show that line of sight across functions, learning becomes a strategic lever for the business,” says the company’s CEO Trond Aas, who is based in Oslo, Norway.

Aas gives the example of the convenience store Circle K. Their training strategy named “Customer Star” focussed on key areas of sales skills and customer service skills. Traditional learning metrics proved harder to capture in this context, especially across 14,000-plus people in eight countries. In light of this, the team identified skills required to achieve their strategic goals and set out to grow these. When they measure impact, they found a 96% reduction in knowledge gaps, a 9.8% increase in mystery shopper scores, and 93% of learners saying they were motivated to apply what they had learned to their job. “The analytics made it possible for HR to measure and prove an entire new set of metrics that are valuable to customer service success and revenue goals,” notes Aas.

What emerges from HR’s use of analytics is not just that the function can use data in order to prove impact and to ensure the work they do has a measurable outcome, but HR can be in charge of what gets measured and why. HR does not need to be limited to traditional or expected metrics, they can identify what is going to be important for the business and their function and capture the change and progress they make as it happens.

Analytics should therefore not be seen as a measure by which HR should be judged, passed or failed, but a strategic tool which HR should own, design, and deploy to target and realise the objectives they see as critical for the business as a whole.