The People Behind the Charts: Strategic HR and Well-being

Well-being programs are often challenged to find their place as a strategic business partner within their organizations. Traditionally, well-being professionals use their passion and deep understanding of the human condition to drive decision-making when what is really needed is a coupling with clear, straightforward analytics of the population at hand to secure a seat at the business strategy table. Like many employers, Universities have a common mission with many unique sub-cultures and goals. Over the past two years, Human Resources at the University of Iowa has partnered with their IT Business Intelligence group to launch a data dashboard project. Dashboards have been released to leaders across campus and have proven to be a tool to connect strategically to the unique business needs of various areas across the enterprise. The four dashboards that have been released include ones focused on Demographics, Turnover/Retention, Absence Management and Well-being. After completing this session, participants will be able to: (1) Describe at least three health or demographic need areas for faculty and staff at the University of Iowa based upon data dashboards that well-being team members should be addressing; (2) Identify partners and collaborators based upon UI's experience that could be utilized in their own work or organization to tell a story with data; and (3) List benefits of integrating well-being data with other strategic human resources information and providing access to key HR business partners.