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Employee and workforce insights are the greatest competitive advantage for organizations dealing with the disruption and uncertainty driving dramatic changes in today’s workplace. Embedded in this is the growing expectation of the human resource (HR) function to understand how workforce analytics informs the business and fuels success. This paper aims to explore how the HR function can achieve this.

The evolution of the “Future of HR” and how it is moving from “descriptive and diagnostic” to “prescriptive and predictive.”

According to KPMG’s 2019 Future of HR survey: 37 per cent of respondents feel “very confident” about HR’s actual ability to transform and move them forward via key capabilities such as analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Over the next year or two, 60 per cent say they plan to invest in predictive analytics. Among those who have invested in AI to date, 88 per cent call the investment worthwhile, with analytics listed as a main priority (33 per cent). Despite data’s remarkable ability to deliver news insights and enhance decision-making, 20 per cent of HR believe analytics will be a primary HR initiative for them over the next one to two years, and only 12 per cent cite analytics as a top management concern.

Taking a page from meeting customer needs, innovative technologies such as AI and the cloud, data analytics can give an organization the potential to gather infinitely greater amounts of information about customers.

Today’s workforce analytics focuses mostly on what happened and why. For instance, you might have tools for identifying areas of high turnover and diagnosing the reasons. But thanks to advancements in technology and data analytics capabilities, HR is better-positioned to be the predictive engine required for the organization’s success.

There has never been a better time for HR to create greater strategic value, as the potential for meaningful workforce insights and analytics comes within reach. Even advancements in cloud-based systems for human capital management are coming packaged with analytics and visualization capabilities, enabling HR leaders to integrate people data with other data sources, such as customer relationship management, for a full view of the business.

This paper will be of value to HR leaders and practitioners who wish to use predictive analytics and emerging technology to drive performance improvement and gain the insights about their workforces.

According to the significant growth of literature and continued adoption of people analytics in practice, it has been promised that people analytics will inform evidence-based decision-making and improve business outcomes. However, existing people analytics literature remains underdeveloped in understanding whether and how such promises have been realized. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the current reality of people analytics and uncover the debates and challenges that are emerging as a result of its adoption.

This study conducts a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed articles focused on people analytics published in the Association of Business School (ABS) ranked journals between 2011 and 2021.

The review illustrates and critically evaluates several emerging debates and issues faced by people analytics, including inconsistency among the concept and definition of people analytics, people analytics ownership, ethical and privacy concerns of using people analytics, missing evidence of people analytics impact and readiness to perform people analytics.

This review presents a comprehensive research agenda demonstrating the need for collaboration between scholars and practitioners to successfully align the promise and the current reality of people analytics.

This systematic review is distinct from existing reviews in three ways. First, this review synthesizes and critically evaluates the significant growth of peer-reviewed articles focused on people analytics published in ABS ranked journals between 2011 and 2021. Second, the study adopts a thematic analysis and coding process to identify the emerging themes in the existing people analytics literature, ensuring the comprehensiveness of the review. Third, this study focused and expanded upon the debates and issues evolving within the emerging field of people analytics and offers an updated agenda for the future of people analytics research.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on human resources (HR) digitalization, specifically on HR analytics, disentangling the concept of analytics applied to HR and explaining the factors that hinder companies from moving to analytics. Therefore, the central research questions addressed in this study are: what does HR analytics encompass? What impedes the adoption of analytics in HR within organizations?

The authors performed a comprehensive literature review on analytics as applied in HR. The authors relied on two of the major multidisciplinary publication databases (i.e. Scopus and WoS). A total of 64 manuscripts from 2010 to 2019 were content analyzed.

The results reveal that there is an ongoing confusion on HR analytics conceptualization. Yet, it seems that there is an emerging consensus on what HR analytics encompasses. The authors have identified 14 different barriers for HR analytics adoption grouped into four categories, namely, data and models, software and technology, people and management. Grounding on them the authors propose a set of 14 key factors to help to successfully adopt HR Analytics in companies.

This paper brings clarity over the conceptualization of HR analytics by offering a comprehensive definition. Additionally, it facilitates business and HR leaders in making informed decisions on adopting and implementing HR analytics. Moreover, it assists HR researchers in positioning their paper more explicitly in current debates and encouraging them to develop some future avenues of research departing from some questions posed.

The firms use training evaluation practices (TEPs) to determine the return of billions of dollars spent on employee training and development activities. The firms need to modernize the set of TEPs for evidence-based workforce management decisions. This study aims to examine a mediation mechanism to explain how human resource (HR) professionals’ design thinking (DT) mindset strengthens the set of TEPs using predictive workforce analytics (PWAs).

The authors used SPSS computational named MLMED to test the proposed relationships by collecting data from 180 management professionals serving in subsidiaries of multinational corporations in Pakistan.

The statistical results demonstrated that DT is not directly related to firms’ TEPs. However, the statistical results supported the mediating role of firms’ use of PWAs between DT and TEPs.

The findings offer a new perspective for firms to use HR professionals’ DT mindset for modernizing the set of existing HR practices.

The purpose of this APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center) research study is to understand which strategic workforce planning approaches are currently in use; whether these approaches are meeting business needs; and what workforce planning challenges organizations are facing today.

This study involved survey research with 236 valid respondents representing organizations from a wide range of industries, regions, workforce sizes and revenues. American productivity and quality center (APQC) identified 46 “best-in-class” workforce planners from among these organizations based on their consistent achievement of superior results from workforce planning.

Best-in-class workforce planners are doing more than closing skills gaps and reducing skills surpluses. They are optimizing talent. Leveraging technology, varied work arrangements and employee development, they assemble the optimal mix of talent to achieve business goals.

The findings provide insight into how best-in-class workforce planners build a strong foundation for effective workforce planning through the distinctive ways they use process, people, technology and time. Organizations that adopt the practices and approaches of best-in-class workforce planners can drive improvements in their own workforce planning process.

This study aims to provide an in-depth understanding of big data analytics (BDA) in human resource management (HRM). The emergence of digital technology and the availability of large volume, high velocity and a great variety of data has forced the HRM to adopt the BDA in managing the workforce.

This paper evaluates the past, present and future trends of HRM through the bibliometric analysis of citation, co-citation and co-word analysis.

Findings from the analysis present significant research clusters that imply the knowledge structure and mapping of research streams in HRM. Challenges in BDA application and firm performances appear in all three bibliometric analyses, indicating this subject’s past, current and future trends in HRM.

Implications on the HRM landscape include fostering a data-driven culture in the workplace to reap the potential benefits of BDA. Firms must strategically adapt BDA as a change management initiative to transform the traditional way of managing the workforce toward adapting BDA as analytical tool in HRM decision-making.

This study presents past, present and future trends in BDA knowledge structure in human resources management.

This study aims to analyze the existing literature in human resource analytics and highlights the future research agenda and trends in the same context. It deals with evaluating regional distribution, identifying key authors, publications, journals and keyword occurrences while examining current literature.

A total of 127 articles exported from the Scopus database were systematically analyzed using bibliometric analysis through VOSviewer, including performance analysis and science mapping of the literature studied.

This research postulates the inconsistency between the number of publications and citations received by an author. There was an increase in collaborative research over the years. Human Resource Management Review was regarded as the most influential journal with maximum citation. Maximum publications came from Asian countries. The study revealed that the author with maximum citation were mostly the first authors of the most cited documents.

This research may be beneficial for both researchers and human resource (HR) practitioners because it identifies the research gaps and research needs in the HR analytics domain. Besides, this study recognizes the patterns in HR analytics literature that helps researchers better understand the subject area.

This research incorporates bibliometric analysis for analyzing HR analytics literature to establish a more exhaustive and systematic understanding of the research area. This research contributes to the existing body of literature and assists fellow researchers in future studies.

Driven by the rapidly accelerating pace of technology-enabled developments within human resource management (HRM), human resource (HR) analytics is infiltrating the research and business agenda. As one of the first in its field, the purpose of this paper is to explore what the future of HR analytics might look like.

Using a sample of 20 practitioners of HR analytics, based in 11 large Dutch organizations, the authors investigated what the application, value, structure, and system support of HR analytics might look like in 2025.

The findings suggest that, by 2025, HR analytics will have become an established discipline, will have a proven impact on business outcomes, and will have a strong influence in operational and strategic decision making. Furthermore, the development of HR analytics will be characterized by integration, with data and IT infrastructure integrated across disciplines and even across organizational boundaries. Moreover, the HR analytics function may very well be subsumed in a central analytics function – transcending individual disciplines such as marketing, finance, and HRM.

The results of the research imply that HR analytics, as a separate function, department, or team, may very well cease to exist, even before it reaches maturity.

Empirical research on HR analytics is scarce, and studies on scenarios, values, and structures of expected developments in HR analytics are non-existent. This research intends to contribute to a better understanding of the development of HR analytics, to facilitate business and HR leaders in taking informed decisions on investing in the further development of the HR analytics discipline. Such investments may lead to an enhanced HR analytics capability within organizations, and cultivate the fact-based and data-driven culture that many organizations and leaders try to pursue.

This study aims to investigate the factors influencing the adoption of data analytics in performance management. By examining the role of organizational and environmental contexts, this study contributes to the existing literature by proposing a novel and detailed technology-organization-environment (TOE) model for the complex interplay between firm characteristics and the adoption of data analytics. The results offer valuable insights and practical implications for organizations seeking to leverage data analytics for effective performance management.

The research draws upon a data set encompassing over 21,869 companies operating across all European Union member states. A multilevel logistic regression model was developed to evaluate the influence of organizational and environmental factors on the likelihood of adopting performance analytics in organizations.

The findings indicate that the lack of awareness of the benefits of data analytics and its practical application to address specific business challenges is a significant barrier to its adoption. Organizational contexts, such as variable-pay systems, employee training, hierarchical structures and frequency of monetary rewards, also influence the adoption of data analytics.

The study informs managers about the strategic role of data analytics capabilities in performance management for improved business intelligence and driving data culture.

The study helps managers understand the strategic role of data analytics capabilities in performance management, leading to improved business intelligence and fostering a data-driven culture in five key areas: structural alignment, strategic decision-making, resource allocation, performance improvement and change management.

The study advances the TOE theory, making it a more detailed and complete framework, particularly applicable to the adoption of performance analytics. It identifies the main factors of adoption that play a crucial role in this process.

The growth of the global labor force and business analytics has significantly impacted human resource management (HRM). Human resource (HR) analytics is an emerging field that creates value for employees and organizations. By examining the existing studies on HR analytics, the paper systematically reviews the literature to identify active research areas and establish a roadmap for future studies in HR analytics.

A portfolio of 503 articles collected from the Scopus database was reviewed. The study has adopted a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach to identify significant themes in the literature.

The HR analytics research domain is classified into four categories: HR functions, statistical techniques, organizational outcomes and employee characteristics. The study has also developed a framework for organizations adopting HR analytics. Linking HR with blockchain technology, explainable artificial intelligence and Metaverse are the areas identified for future researchers.

The framework will assist practitioners in identifying statistical techniques for optimizing various HR functions. The paper discovers that by implementing HR analytics, HR managers and business partners can run reports, make dashboards and visualizations and make evidence-based decision-making.

The previous studies have not applied any machine learning techniques to identify the topics in the extant literature. The paper has applied machine learning tools, making the review more robust and providing an exhaustive understanding of the domain.