The HR data model is the organised foundation behind the HR dashboards in Humanforce Analytics. This article explains what a data model is and the types of analyses the HR data model supports. It is written for HR practitioners and Analysts who want to understand what sits behind the numbers, rather than how to build a specific dashboard.
What is a data model?
A data model is a structured way of organising your people data so it can be analysed consistently. It turns raw records from across your HR system into a set of related, clearly defined building blocks.
A data model is made up of three parts:
- Events record the things that happen over time, such as an employee starting, leaving, completing a form, or having a pay change.
- Descriptive information adds context to those events, such as the employee, their job, their department, their location, or the date.
- Relationships connect the events and descriptive information together, so you can move between them in your analysis. For example, you can link a leaver back to their department, tenure and reason for leaving.
Because the data is modelled this way, you can combine these building blocks to answer questions, without needing to write code or understand how the underlying systems store the data.
A point-in-time view of your workforce
The HR data model is time-aware. It holds a daily picture of your people and their jobs, so you can choose any date and see your workforce exactly as it stood on that day.
This means you can:
- View your workforce as it is today, or as it was at any point in the past.
- Track how measures such as headcount or compliance change over time.
- Compare one period with another, for example month on month or year on year.
Most workforce measures describe your active population on the date you select. Employees on leave are still counted as active, and a separate "on leave" indicator lets you identify them.
What the HR data model describes
The HR data model covers the employee lifecycle and the wider workforce. It brings together the following subject areas:
- Employees – the people in your organisation, including demographics such as gender, age, tenure and work rights.
- Jobs and positions – the role each person holds, including title, location, department, employment terms, pay and supervisor. One person can hold more than one job.
- Organisation structure – the legal employer, business units, and locations or regions.
- Pay and remuneration – salaries, hourly rates, allowances, pay grades and labour cost.
- Workforce movement – starters, leavers, length of service and turnover.
- Reporting lines – supervisors and the number of direct reports (span of control).
- Qualifications and compliance – qualifications held, their expiry, and whether each job meets its mandatory requirements.
- Forms and surveys – issued forms such as performance reviews, check-ins and surveys, and their answers.
- Wellbeing and engagement – happiness ratings and employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).
- Goals – individual employee goals, their progress and completion.
- Notes and performance management – recorded notes about employees and formal performance improvement plans.
- Training and recruitment – training undertaken and its cost, and how a hire was sourced and what it cost.
- Change history – a record of changes to jobs and pay over time.
- Time – a calendar that underpins all the time-based analysis.
How the information connects
The subject areas above are linked through clear relationships, which let you move between them in your analysis:
- Each job belongs to one employee, and one employee can hold several jobs.
- Each job belongs to a department, a location and a legal employer.
- Each job has an assigned supervisor.
- Events such as starters, leavers, pay changes, training and forms attach to an employee or job on the date they happened.
- Qualifications connect to jobs, and combine with each job's requirements to determine whether the job is compliant.
- Forms connect to their questions and answers.
- The calendar connects to every date, so any measure can be viewed over time.
What you can measure
The HR data model includes a wide range of measures. They are grouped here by theme:
- Workforce size – headcount, full-time equivalents (FTE) and number of jobs, both today and over time. Average monthly headcount is also available.
- Turnover – the number of leavers and the attrition rate, including an annualised rate, and splits for voluntary, involuntary and low-tenure attrition.
- Hiring – the number of starters and the starter rate, plus recruitment source and cost to hire.
- Internal mobility – the share of employees who had a role or pay change.
- Pay and cost – base and total salary, hourly rates, total labour cost, and the gender pay gap.
- Compliance – the share of jobs that fully meet their requirements, and qualifications that are expiring soon.
- Forms and surveys – forms issued, completed, overdue and ignored, with their related rates and average time to complete.
- Wellbeing and engagement – the eNPS score, the mix of promoters and detractors, and the spread of happiness ratings.
- Goals – goals created and completed, the completion rate, overdue goals and average progress.
- Span of control – the number of direct reports a supervisor has.
How you can slice the data
You can group and filter these measures by a broad set of attributes, including:
- Organisation – legal employer, business unit and location or region.
- Role and employment – position title, work class, work type, employment condition, award, pay grade and probation status.
- Employee – gender, age, age group, tenure, tenure cohort and work rights.
- Movement and status – job status, turnover type, turnover reason and whether the employee is on leave.
- Manager – supervisor.
- Subject-specific – qualification status and type, form name and category, goal category, note category, training type and recruitment source.
- Time – day, month, quarter or year.
What types of analyses are supported
By combining the measures and attributes above, you can answer questions such as:
- Workforce composition – How many employees do we have, and how is the workforce made up by department, location, role, age or tenure?
- Workforce trends – How has headcount or FTE changed over time?
- Turnover – What is our attrition rate, and how does voluntary, involuntary and low-tenure turnover compare?
- Hiring – How many people are starting, and which recruitment sources are most used?
- Diversity – How is the workforce distributed by gender and age, and what is the gender pay gap?
- Remuneration – How do salaries and hourly rates vary by department, role or pay grade, and what is our total labour cost?
- Tenure – How is length of service distributed across the workforce?
- Compliance – What share of jobs fully meet their requirements, and which qualifications are expiring soon?
- Forms and surveys – What are our form completion and overdue rates, and how long do forms take to complete?
- Wellbeing and engagement – What is our eNPS score, and how are happiness ratings trending?
- Goals and performance – How many goals are completed or overdue, and how is progress tracking?
- Org design – What is the average span of control across supervisors?
Things to keep in mind
A few characteristics of the data model affect how figures should be read:
- Measures are "as at" the date you select. The data model holds a daily picture of your workforce, so the numbers reflect the chosen date.
- Employees on leave are counted as active. Use the "on leave" indicator to identify them separately.
- A person can hold more than one job. Job counts can therefore be higher than headcount.
- Jobs without a confirmed end date continue to be counted as active until an end date is confirmed.
- Brief breaks in service are treated as continuous. Short gaps between periods of employment are merged when calculating tenure.
- Pay timing is modelled. Payment dates are calculated from each employee's pay setup rather than taken from payroll, and partial pay cycles are adjusted accordingly.
- Pay is shown in a single currency. Amounts are shown in Australian dollars by default, so cross-region comparisons use converted values.
- eNPS uses each respondent's most recent response. Promoters score 9–10, passives 7–8, and detractors 0–6. The score ranges from −100 to +100.
- Compliance is assessed for active jobs only, and a requirement is only met by a current qualification.
- Forms capture context at the time of issue. An employee's department or role on a form may differ from their current details.
Related articles
- Feature Overview - Humanforce Analytics
- Employee Wellbeing Dashboard
- Overview: Permission Groups