HR teams rely on clear structures to manage reporting processes, authorisations, tasks, and role allocation across an organisation. Having an overview of complex organisational charts and a flexible framework to respond to change is indispensable.
Graph data platforms are everywhere – from search engines and GPS navigation to powering social media and in contact tracing applications. But how can graph data platforms benefit the HR industry?
Graph data platforms efficiently model complex networks of entities and their interrelationships, which is why they are increasingly being employed to make sense of HR information. After all, HR teams rely on clear structures to manage reporting processes, authorisations, tasks, and role allocation across an organisation. Having an overview of complex organisational charts and a flexible framework to respond to change is indispensable.
From carmakers to rocket scientists
Global carmaker Daimler uses a graph data platform to manage its 250,000 employees who are based all over the world. By putting information into a graph data platform, Daimler can get much better insight into its personnel structures and different levels of organisation. It uses nodes such as “employee” and “expertise” and connections such as “reports”, “participates” or “active”. This makes it much easier to source available people and skills from wherever they are.
NASA is another example of an organisation using a graph data platform to tackle its workforce challenges. By building a graph data platform, it enabled its project and HR managers to access and query complex data about employees, departments, programmes, locations, skills, career paths in real time. This empowers them to extract insights about employees’ skills and learning and development trends. They can track and predict where there are skills gaps, or where skills may need to be modified to match new projects. As a result, NASA can effectively conduct succession planning and create a strategic alignment model for any project to meet strategic targets.
Using graph data platforms to manage risk
Graph data platforms can also play a key role in managing risk. Distributed workforces can represent more complex security issues, particularly when people are working outside a physical office network. One global banking and financial services company is using a graph data platform to drive intelligence insights and empower risk analysts to grant or deny requests such as allowing a bank employee to get USB access. This gives them much better context about what a specific employee does and what critical information and systems they have access to. The bank can then trace employees’ actions to detect and prevent cyber breaches and fraud.
Previa, a Swedish occupational health company, is using graphs to identify and help prevent the risk of employee burnout. It has created a sick leave management solution with a graph data platform. Previa’s data experts have been able to find patterns in sick leave trends, such as burnout in multiple employees that could suggest a wider problem. These insights are enabling Previa to improve workplace safety and productivity while reducing the risk of burnout.
Another company is using a graph data platform to capture employee email metadata, badge data, grievances, accidents, theft, and compliance. They have already managed to identify call centre productivity drivers, retention drivers, and other management insights that they had not previously understood.
Graph data platforms and people analytics
The adoption of graph data platforms in HR is accelerating, with notable HR analyst Josh Bersin pointing to its potential.
As he writes in his report HR Technology 2021: The Definitive Guide: “Experience is vitally important, but so are technical skills, human skills, and relationships. In a sense, every individual in the company is no longer a node on the hierarchy. We are each nodes in a network, connected to many other people, projects, information, and history.”
Bersin notes that many HR organisations still have hierarchical job families with detailed descriptions written into the job itself, which he describes as a “very brittle, time-wasting effort”. He has identified graph data platforms as a potential solution that can model these complex networks of nodes and relationships, enabling a much clearer and more comprehensive perspective with more powerful analysis and insight generation. Bersin predicts that graph data platforms, combined with blockchain identity management and security, could form the basis of “an entirely new industry of HCM (Human Capital Management) technology” in the next five to 10 years.
Graph data platforms enable the kind of analysis that HR managers need in an era of exponentially fast-growing information. They’ve been used to identify issues such as micromanagement negatively impacting morale, how delegating responsibility can improve sales team performance, and picking up issues such as communication biases and productivity issues. It’s a technology that is poised to reshape the future of HR and how we address the complex needs of the modern workforce.
By Nik Vora, Neo4j APAC Vice-President
This article was first published by HRWorld