The Outcome-Driven Government CHRO

From managing up to five generations in the workplace to fulfilling high-skilled positions with a decreasing talent pool, the CHRO office of the future will face many challenges. And Public Sector entities are no exception to that. In our previous blog, we saw how Government finance agencies can become outcome-driven by using hybrid analytics. We will now follow a similar approach to explore how Human Resources agencies can overcome their own challenges.

What does outcome-driven mean for the CHRO office?

In recent years, Public Sector HR departments have shifted from a workforce management strategy that is purely process-driven to a more outcome-driven approach. In these new agencies, employees are put at the center and providing them with a great overall working experience is paramount. Happy public servants have been proven to better serve their community, leading to increased citizen satisfaction and trust in government.

To boost employee experience, Government HR professionals are focusing on certain outcomes which, despite of being quite diverse, share some commonalities. To list a few, departments are looking to:

• Build a strong public service culture within the workforce
• Create a positive and dynamic work environment to attract young talent
• Improve employee experiences to retain and recruit talent
• Optimize skills across the different lines of business of the administration

For CHROs, the best way to achieve said goals is by asking the right questions and analyzing all their data in a holistic way. Some of these forward-looking questions are depicted in the image below.

However, these are not the only questions. Following Gartner’s Analytical Framework, there are many others that can help CHROs achieve their goals. For instance, while it is important to ask, “what was the average employment duration in the last five years?”, it might be equally important to understand why people are leaving. Will a certain incentive make them stay or is the problem somewhere else? What should my headcount be in two years to maximize efficiency? This can be linked to external input as well… “how does our performance relate to citizen satisfaction?”

To provide a response to these questions, we need to look for the correct data sources. Looking at the structure of a State or Local CHRO office as the one shown below, we realize that in order to respond to most of these questions, we need to pull data from different verticals. And for that, CHROs will require specific analytics tools.

Why Hybrid Analytics?

A Hybrid Analytics strategy offers great opportunities for State and Local CHROs to become outcome- driven, by:

• Embracing digitization – The recent pandemic has shown us how Public Sector agencies struggled to deliver new services with legacy systems that were decades old. Combining those legacy systems with the agility of a powerful cloud solution will not only allow faster response but will also be the first step towards modern analytics.
• Increasing data visibility – Many CHROs can’t trust their HR data analytics, which limits their ability to properly manage their staff and conduct accurate workforce planning. A Hybrid Strategy allows agencies to benefit from the power and flexibility of Cloud Analytics while still leveraging their on-premise infrastructure. Besides with live connections, the data doesn’t need to be sent to the Cloud and therefore it can stay uncorrupted in the database creating a safe and trusted source of truth.
• Ensuring operational agility – Using augmented analytics on workforce metrics, agencies can optimize their skillsets to ensure agility during unprecedented situations, such as COVID-19. This way, when new challenges arise, the right talent can be assigned to each task, increasing productivity and delivering tangible business value.
• Managing risk – Talent recruitment and retention are key challenges for Government Agencies. With Planning and Predictive capabilities, CHROs can easily and quickly run “what-if” scenarios to better understand what their workforce will look like in the future and identify potential risks ahead of time.
• Building the public servant of the future – With extended analytics, CHROs can incorporate other data sources. For instance, adding qualitative data from Employee and Citizen Experience to performance KPIs will help them understand their staff’s motivations and establish correlations between employee satisfaction and citizen’s trust.

CHRO offices will continue to evolve on their journey to become outcome driven. A renewed culture, an attractive work environment, and employee satisfaction will be of the utmost importance for State and Local organizations to deliver excellent service to constituents and increase their trust in Government. And that process starts by leveraging data as an asset and using the right data analytics tools.

In the next blog of the series we will explore how Government COOs can leverage hybrid analytics to make their agencies outcome driven. If you want to know more about Hybrid Analytics and how SAP can help your agency become outcome-driven, please visit this link.