School News

HKBU School of Business’ Department of Management, the Centre for Human Resources Strategy and Development, and the HKBU Human Resources Management Society jointly organised the “HR Learning Day: The Past, Present, and Future of People Analytics”. The event was held on 9 January 2018, attended by 70 HR practitioners, programme advisors, mentors, alumni and students.
 

Prof. Xu Huang, Head of the Department of Management kicked off the event and addressed the two keynote speakers. The event featured Prof. Wayne Cascio, Distinguished Professor of University of Colorado and a Visiting Professor of the MSc in Strategic Human Resources Management programme of the HKBU School of Business, and Mr. Rizwan Masood Raja, Head, HR, Retail Banking and Wealth Management, GCNA and HK, Standard Chartered Bank.
 


“Talent analytics consists of 70% logic and 30% data,” Prof. Cascio suggested. He noted that often HR practitioners might have the assumption that they have to do another master’s degree in big data in order to be involved. “But indeed it’s all about having the spot-on logic right from the beginning – and it’s where HR specialists play a key role in terms of identifying the pivotal issues that are worth data collection – issues that are critical to potentially driving firm-level outcomes. With the right type of data collected and analysed, it boils down to HR practitioners’ skillful storytelling to advocate the corresponding policy or system change on the high level, and to drive employee engagement for behavourial and operational changes that could lead to positive business outcomes within an organisation.”
 


Mr. Raja, on the other hand, shed light on how analytics enables business partners. He illustrated a concept called “Fact-Based HR”, which combines business objectives with people strategies. He believes that “more facts are needed to eliminate potential human errors, more insights should be added to help business set up an organisation’s key strategic objectives, and more different people should be included to promote fairness and diversity and to utilise human potential to the fullest.”



Four faculty members from the Department of Management, including Prof. Randy Chiu, Prof. Liqun Wei, Dr. Amy Chen and Dr. Marta Dowejko also presented their latest research insights in respective areas including HR analytics and Pay Survey, the role of social skills, the importance of organisational politics and intrapreneurship for fostering innovation. Their sharing highlighted how academic research findings could be very useful for managing and capitalising HR capital.