Preserving HR data integrity is an important factor when using HR systems, but it rarely happens because HR inputs come from many different resources and processes. This is why many HR teams panic when faced with dirty data. But what makes it dirty? Dirty data refers to the errors or gaps within your workforce data, such as missing information, typos, and other simple human errors.
When faced with low quality data, many HR teams fear that they’ll never be able to extract valuable insights from it and have no idea how to clean it. However, dirty data doesn’t have to be a barrier to beginning an analytics project. In fact, achieving HR data integrity is a lot easier than you think.
You’re Not Alone
This first thing to keep in mind is that you’re not alone. HR teams everywhere encounter dirty data, and your data is not any worse than theirs. The truth is, it is nearly impossible to have perfect HR data integrity; because it is mostly manually entered by different parties, so HR data is traditionally dirty.
But dirty data is not useless. With the right tool at your disposal, you can gain valuable insights and metrics from the data you already have. Plugging your data into a workforce analytics platform can help you understand where your biggest gaps are, making cleanup faster, easier, and more strategic.
Your Data Doesn’t Need to be Perfect
While good business decisions require accurate data, perfect accuracy isn’t always necessary. What you should do is determine an allowable error rate. Data doesn’t need to be perfect to predict human outcomes.
It’s important to be able to analyze trends — not always the exact value of a metric. Tools like ZeroedIn can transform and clean your HR data and reveal trends so that you don’t have to sift through tedious data sets on your own.
More Data is Not Always Better
Stressing because you don’t have huge volumes of data? Just like your data doesn’t need to be perfect, you don’t need a ton of it. In fact, the more data there is, the higher likelihood that some of it will be unusable. You’ll receive impactful insights as long as you have the means to transform it into useful metrics. It’s time to move away from the mentality that you need to get more data and instead focus on collecting and transforming the right data into the metrics that matter most.
Trust the Technology
Humans tend to trust their gut more than machines, preferring to leverage their years of experience as an HR professional to help them make important decisions. This has led to many people developing what is known as “algorithm aversion,” or going by one’s gut instinct even when the machine suggests otherwise.
In reality, people can’t readily do as quickly and efficiently what tools like ZeroedIn can. It’s crucial to keep in mind that in the end, the machine can’t make the decision for you. It will provide you with evidence-based facts and you will be free to make the decision based on them.
It’s time to face reality: perfectly clean data is an unrealistic goal. In fact, HR data integrity can be achieved with imperfect data, as long as it is transformed properly. However, the value of your transformed data is dependent on your solution provider. A leader among workforce analytics companies, ZeroedIn has the tools you need to turn your dirty HR data into valuable insights so that you can make accurate and timely HR decisions. Contact our team of data scientists today or schedule a demo to get started.
