To determine how valuable HR dashboards are, and how you can make the most out of them, we spoke to Jane Corbett, Jigsaw Cloud’s Head of Professional Services. 

In recent years, many HR leaders have been adopting dashboard solutions to gain a better view of their organisations. Dashboards can be a valuable tool for providing visibility into companywide KPIs, diversity quotas, demographics, and more.

However, they’re much more than just tracking tools; they have the capabilities to transform HR into a true strategic partner for the business.

We spoke to our Head of Professional Services, Jane Corbett, to find out how today’s HR leaders can succeed with dashboards, and what they should be looking for in the right solution. Here’s what she had to say:

What challenges drive HR leaders to build or adopt dashboard solutions?

“To help deal with challenges such as The Great Resignation, employment needs from new generations of employees, and COVID-19, it’s crucial HR leaders gain an understanding of their organisation.

Many HR and management information systems (MIS) analysts will be familiar with the increased data and report requests into headcounts, competencies, and how their business is performing against its KPIs. It’s these needs for insights that are fuelling the need for faster and more efficient reporting systems.

Unfortunately, many organisations still use offline solutions like spreadsheets to manage their data – which is often a slow and strenuous process. Using spreadsheets can involve days of manual effort collecting data from siloed sources and inputting the data into cells. It’s a lot of work before you can produce any meaningful insights, and it involves risks of errors and miscalculations.

Even if you do produce accurate insights, they’ll often be hard to visualise and difficult to understand – which is especially challenging if you want to share them with senior management teams.”

How can the right dashboard solutions address these challenges?

“Many HR systems are often big, complicated databases – and with some dashboards, that data won’t be any easier to consume. They can have the complexity of an aircraft flight deck: lots of numbers and dials but too many to view all at once.

The right dashboard should be simple. It should have high-level data in one view, and the ability to show more of what else is available in different – but just as simple – pages. It should allow data to be easily visualised and managed, without all the manual effort that’s associated with data analysis.

Effective dashboard solutions can also automate the collection of data from siloed sources and its analysis. This can give HR leaders instant access to powerful insights and reporting capabilities – helping them stay focused on their output, rather than data management.

The ability to generate and visualise consumable, real-time insights can even help HR leaders better inform senior decision makers and outside stakeholders. This leads to great conversations about what’s happening in the business and helps the entire organisation see how it’s performing against KPIs.

Finally, dashboards can equip HR leaders with the ability to evaluate their own processes, spot inefficiencies, and help them determine whether to intervene in certain scenarios – transforming HR teams into a more strategic partner throughout their businesses.”

How do dashboards work in SAP SuccessFactors?

“Dashboards within SAP SuccessFactors are created with the People Analytics solution, a single tool for reporting, insights and workforce analytics and planning. It allows for more complicated calculations than canvas reporting, and the best part is that the solution exists as part of the core HR product and comes at no extra cost.

The People Analytics solution directly connects to SAP SuccessFactors modules like Payroll, Onboarding, Compensation, Performance Management, and more, giving HR leaders easy access to the data using only one solution.

HR leaders have multiple pre-built reporting templates to choose from to analyse their central HR processes, which means the People Analytics solution is easy to get started with. And that’s one of the biggest benefits of dashboard solutions like this – they bring huge value in a straightforward, visual way.

Despite People Analytics’ ease of use, there’s still a lot of depth to its capabilities, and the potential to create highly customised dashboards and reports that meet your unique needs. And as your organisation grows, so will your data demands – whether that means tracking new KPIs or meeting new quotas – so it’s crucial you have a solution that can scale with you.”

Why is it better to partner with Jigsaw Cloud for custom HR dashboards?

“Building and maintaining custom dashboards involves a significant amount of data manipulation skills that many organisations don’t have available in house. Without these skills, it can be easy to end up with solutions that aren’t properly integrated or don’t fully meet the organisation’s needs.

The easiest way to get the most out of a dashboard solution like People Analytics is to find the right partner. Here at Jigsaw Cloud, we offer a consultancy approach to creating bespoke dashboards for our clients.

We look at what they really need from their workforce analytics, and help them build and implement customised dashboards that integrate with their existing systems and meet HR requirements from a compliance perspective. What we’re really trying to do is help our clients become self-sufficient, so they can easily build customised solutions themselves as their analytics requirements change.

That’s why training is such a big part of our process. Before a dashboard goes live, our clients build core competencies and comfort levels among their teams so that they can create any customisations they might need on top of their bespoke dashboards and reports.

Our partnership continues after the dashboards go live, too. We have a support portal and ticketing system available for any ongoing support our clients need – plus, we’re only a phone call away.”

Make the most of your HR dashboards with SAP SuccessFactors

If you’d like to find out what you could achieve with your own custom HR dashboards, or you’d like to learn more about what’s possible in SAP SuccessFactors, we have consultants like Jane with decades of HR experience across a wide range of sectors. Just get in touch to see how we can help.