​​Industries around the globe are demanding a data-driven and strategic HR department to find competitive advantages in talent pools and help retain key employees. Data-driven HR teams can use data to hire more diverse and high-quality talent faster. They are more proactive about compensation, career advancement, and engagement initiatives, which drives retention throughout a company. A company that keeps employees happy, keeps employees.

And it’s not just about retaining employees. Strategic HR departments can also be more focused on how they budget, plan, and strategize for succession management—ensuring equity and compliance with greater agility. They can deliver tools and platforms that help teams optimize employee wellness, education, and productivity while committing to a greater work-life balance.

Like many large companies, TIBCO’s HR department had a wealth of information about employees but wanted to be more strategic in using analytics for greater insights. The department had several goals:

• Decrease talent attrition
• Increase employee engagement
• Ensure more diversity
• Reduce time-to-hire

And TIBCO’s HR department faced complicated data challenges:

• Disparate and unconnected data sources
• Manual and reactive data analysis
• Inconsistent KPI reporting
• Increasing demand for insights

Finding the Right Tool

TIBCO’s HR department sought a solution that could help the team proactively ask and answer the right questions. With a holistic analytics approach, the department could summarize its data and then transform it through data science.

The TIBCO Connected Intelligence suite offered HR world-class technology to help the department scale beyond its business intelligence needs. With one platform, HR would have a connected resource for integrating data and streaming frameworks. And most importantly, that platform would be secure. Nick Jesteadt, senior director of people analytics, adds, “This is really sensitive data. It's personally identifiable information, and then layer on top of that, laws like GDPR, California privacy, and a whole host of others. The fact that our platform is secure and everything you work with is in a single source is a huge deal.

Building and Training

The first step of the project was to address data silos and integration. To address its data challenges in a unified way, the team needed to build an agile data fabric—a modern, distributed data architecture that included shared data assets and optimized pipelines. Using TIBCO Data Virtualization software, the team could aggregate business data, support self-service analytics, modernize its data archetype, and ensure compliance. Once the data was clean and connected, the team used TIBCO Spotfire software to scale enterprise analytics and build machine learning models. By seamlessly using both TIBCO Data Virtualization and Spotfire software together, the team built a solution that streamlined data cleansing, preparation, and analysis.

The People Analytics team rolled out initial summary dashboards, then scaled to add predictive analytics dashboards as they matured. Next came training for key HR members on how to build and use the dashboards. It was important to ensure all users felt comfortable with the new technology.

The team continued to expand into HR education and manager dashboards, reaching 100 percent user adoption in HR and creating over 600 unique manager dashboards. This wouldn’t have been possible without a user-friendly product.

Business leaders across TIBCO have benefited from the project. They can now respond to inquiries and set strategies with data-driven insights; proactively bring areas of concern and solutions to the business; shift recruitment strategies and increase diversity; present deeper data insights to the board of directors; and access data on team engagement.

The team has delivered major results. Managers across TIBCO (more than 600) now have dashboards from which to spark insights into their teams. With immediate access to data, they can develop actionable insights and act on them in real time. All HR business partners are trained in Spotfire software and use it frequently in their day-to-day operations—empowered by the ability to easily search for information via a TIBCO Data Virtualization self-service directory of virtualized data. Users can spend more time analyzing data and less time searching for it.

It now takes two hours to complete compliance reporting, down from one week. Teams can respond to an HR request within 12 hours, which previously took more than 72. Time-to-fill positions compressed from 15 days to 8. According to the team, the change has been phenomenal.

What lies behind the metrics are unique, specialized dashboards that numerous HR use cases that rely on for:

• Attrition hotbeds
• Diversity hiring sources
• Time-to-fill
• Disengagement

These key use cases help TIBCO achieve its business objectives by hiring faster, driving engagement and retention, and ensuring that people want to work at the company. Additionally, with the TIBCO Data Virtualization platform, HR is reducing costs and gaining greater business value from its data. These use cases have also opened the door for data-backed decisions on diversity and inclusion. Elijah Ross, HR diversity, equity, and inclusion analyst, explains, “Through analysis, we've found that more diverse teams perform well; they've had higher engagement based on surveys.”

The HR team notes several specific business outcomes due to the use of the TIBCO Connected Intelligence suite. With a more data-driven approach, the HR department is more proactive than reactive. The team has democratized data insights on team attrition, hiring, diversity, engagement, career growth, and equity. By equipping managers and business partners with these insights, HR has increased diversity and decreased attrition.

TIBCO’s vision for HR is a department that uses best-in-class analytics to ensure data-driven strategies that make the experience of working more human. TIBCO HR has improved the employee experience by driving measurable investments into equity, diversity, hiring, engagement, wellness, culture, and retention.

Michele Haddad, chief people officer at TIBCO, sums it up: "Being able to turn data into insights is such a critical need, especially now. These metrics have allowed us to highlight areas of focus so much quicker and with deeper analysis than we ever could before. I'm a huge fan of TIBCO People Analytics."