Critically evaluate how data analytics and technological developments present practical and ethical challenges for people professionals: CIPD Assignment, UK

4.5 Critically evaluate how data analytics and technological developments present practical and ethical challenges for people professionals.

Question 17
“The challenge facing the profession is best characterized by the common expression, ‘I’m a people person, not a numbers person’, which exists in pockets throughout the profession”. Critically evaluate how you can address this challenge within your organization, or one that is familiar to you, to use insights from people’s data to inform business decisions.

The quotation in this question will resonate very accurately in many HR departments. Many indeed go into our profession because they want to spend their working lives dealing with people's problems and challenges. The way that organizations attract, retain, motivate, and engage people fascinates them more than technical and operational issues. They are also good at dealing with difficult characters, relish challenging casework, and exhibit high levels of emotional intelligence. The problem is that this type of work, involving the exercise of interpersonal skills, only comprises half of what most HR people spend their time doing.

There is very much ‘a hard side’ to people management as well as ‘a soft side’ and an effective people management professional needs to demonstrate a degree of proficiency in both types of activity. Numbers are more central to the latter and this is therefore where we tend as a profession to be weaker than we should.

Managing an Advanced Diploma 9 payroll is fine, but we are less sure of ourselves collectively when using metrics and employment-related accounting ratios. The world of predictive analytics, with its algorithms and capacity for mining big data, may be unattractive for these reasons, but the opportunities it offers are huge and organizations looking to remain productive and efficient need to embrace it.

The extent to which this ‘fear of numbers’ is hurting the development of people management in particular organizations is, of course, very varied. So the extent and nature of the challenges that learners will discuss in answering this question will differ and we should not therefore be too prescriptive when marking it. There is though a clear requirement in the question for a critical evaluation to be included, so answers should not describe existing initiatives uncritically.

Strong answers will focus both on how different types of data could be better used in evaluating existing practices and developing new practices and on mechanisms such as appropriate training and development which will enhance a team’s capacity to make better use of available data. Strong answers may also reflect the need to recruit a more balanced team of people management professionals with different areas of competence. Whatever the precise arguments that are developed, they need to be well-referenced and persuasively justified to achieve high marks.