Why should I care about real-time dashboards?
Dashboards are a great way of summarising a lot of information into a more digestible view of what’s going on. Set up correctly they enable you to see at a glance where your potential risks are, where your bottlenecks are, what’s working and what’s not and highlight a potential course of action. Dashboards are not new and used across most business functions. So… if you work in HR why should you care about real-time dashboards?
What’s all the real-time fuss about?
It’s the ‘real-time’ component of dashboards that really do make the difference. Data-visualisation used in dashboards is a great way to view historical data and necessary for monitoring and in many instances the past helps us plan for the future. Historical data helps with monitoring efficiencies and in-efficiencies and allows users to spot emerging trends. These sorts of dashboards can contain time-sensitive data such as sales numbers, cash flow, operational data, service delivery, inventory-related data, staff scheduling and staff churn rates.
This all sounds great, but the issue for businesses so often in order to create your useful and relevant historical dashboard, your systems and process may be pulling data from siloed locations and its old. Now old may only mean a few days, but if it takes a week to deliver a meaningful dashboard, its already out of date and you may be making decisions based on inaccurate information. Real-time dashboards mean, trusting your data, and then trusting the decisions you make using that data and the dashboard you’re using.
You should make a fuss about real-time dashboards, because they give you the level of accuracy that tells you what is happening now, not what happened a week ago.
Real-time dashboard scenario
The key functions of real-time dashboards are twofold:
- Alerting
- Responding
A real-time dashboard allows you to see the most important pieces of information, data and numbers, right in front of you… now! Businesses in sectors such as retail, logistics, hospitality, construction, manufacturing, oil and gas, mining, hospitals, teaching, transportation and energy the need for real-time data and dashboards is essential. The key is having the right numbers in front of you open which to make decisions and take action. The need for this has been further heightened by COVID-19.
A real-time dashboard creates visibility on suppliers, transport running on time, staff in the right locations to meet the business needs. Well created real-time dashboards shows if a business, whatever function, is working as they should and highlight issues.
Make informed decisions that you can trust
According to EY, HR professionals spend about 86% of their time on admin work within HR and we know from what HR and payroll teams tell us that they want to accelerate digitisation in order to free up time, particularly with the additional workloads created from Furlough, flex-furlough, absences and health and wellness of their people.
This digitisation includes real-time dashboards to facilitate faster, better and smarter decision making. Research would suggest that these types of dashboards improve time-to-decision and facilitates a more agile organisation that is responsive to the internal and external environment. HR teams are more effective with the right information to hand.
That old adage ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’ is more relevant than ever. By integrating systems and data, real and measurable efficiencies can be achieved.
Identify the problems before they happen
Its not quite a crystal ball, but its pretty close in a very believable sense! There may be problems with your production, your delivery, your service and staff blend to deliver that service… the potential situations are endless. But without the right level of visibility of critical data, you can easily miss the warning signs. A real-time dashboard will help you proactively see and analyse the problems or potential problems before they become big, expensive problems. Enter the crystal ball.
A real-time view that integrates historical data such as sales performance, weather, seasonality, order books etc enables you to take action and alleviate the risk or problem before it happens. You have the ability to act quickly and agilely.
Integrating your sources of data, gives you a single source of truth, that you trust. Once you digitise this you can remove the burden of manual data entry, which is subject to error and may not even get entered in the first place. The right dashboard, that lands on any device you want to use creates a paperless system, protects your data and removes errors. Its fast and easy too.
Surprisingly, this digital approach to real-time dashboards increases engagement from your teams. Not all of us are good with numbers and data, but when delivered in an easy to read, understandable fashion, engagement goes up exponentially. Staff can see at a glance what they need to take action on and it’s a great way to empower your people.
It’s for all these reasons that so many HR and payroll team are crying out for real-time dashboards and why its high on the Christmas Wish List this year. If you’d like to like some help integrating your HR processes and easing the burden, please get in touch: santa@elementsuite.com
