Finance
Finance departments are often tasked with the question of how to increase profitability and carry out the job of cost control. In order to make these decisions, significant quantitative analysis must take place – and there’s no doubt that this can often be precise and accurate if carried out in the right way. Connected working, however, can bolster the findings made by a finance department even further. The qualitative data available from a HR department – from an employee feedback survey, say – can provide illuminating context and helpful explainers which help finance to see their own data in a new light. With the Accounting Web survey reporting that a whole 10% of financial directors think that their role has become less strategic, meanwhile, allowing finance to work alongside HR in this way means finance teams have more of a chance to contribute to holistic strategy-setting.
HR
Over in HR, the main questions are usually how to work more efficiently and how to increase productivity. The sorts of datasets produced by HR can be objective and quantitative, like in finance – but because they are often based on subjective, qualitative evidence such as employee feedback forms, there’s still a risk built in. One person’s idea of a positive workplace, for example, may be another person’s idea of an average workplace – which can skew results. The personalised nature of HR data, however, means it is often the catalyst for discovering major procedural or recruitment problems. And when qualitative data is linked to and underpins quantitative financial data, meanwhile, the increased context means ambiguity is removed.
Connected data
But what’s the solution? For many workplaces, the answer is to place both data from finance and data from HR into their wider business context and look out for any interrelationships between the two. Take the example of low employee morale levels in a certain team: HR may be able to discover such a trend, but it may take insights from finance to explain it – such as a high profit target causing stress. This way, both finance and HR leaders will have the data they need to take quality strategic decisions for the future.
With the debate over accuracy continuing to persist in many workplaces, it’s clear that lots of businesses are still on a quest for that elusive single version of the truth. But ultimately, neither finance nor HR has to win out in the end. In fact, it’s the sort of issue that can be resolved by designing a process of collaboration. With the impact of the pandemic since 2020, workers around the world are now spending more time working remotely and therefore using collaboration platforms. There’s now more than ever before a clear opportunity to bring together the two camps and ensure that data from both sets of teams is adequately represented.