HR Analytics and Building Evidence for Sustainability

Covering Assessment Criterion 2.3 of the FREE01 HR & Sustainability unit, this video addresses how people professionals build and deploy evidence to shift sustainable decision-making from aspiration to organisational priority. Central to the video is HR analytics — also referred to in practice as people analytics or workforce analytics — examined across four distinct levels: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. Each level represents a different relationship with workforce data, from accounting for what has already occurred to recommending future courses of action.

The video connects HR analytics directly to sustainability outcomes by working through specific KPIs including turnover, absence, engagement, and pay and progression fairness. These metrics are not treated in isolation; the video shows how they feed into ESG reporting inputs and governance forums, forming the evidential basis that organisations use when reporting on the social dimension of sustainability. Insights drawn from employee relations data feature alongside these measures, illustrating how patterns of inequality or wellbeing trends that remain invisible in day-to-day operations become legible only through systematic data analysis.

Flexible working and its relationship to environmental impact — specifically reduced commuting and associated carbon savings — serves as a concrete example of how analytics can sustain and expand organisational practices with dual social and environmental benefits. Pay and progression data appears as a further illustration of how the same analytical approach tests whether an organisation's stated commitment to fairness reflects workforce reality. Throughout, the video situates these methods within the governance and reporting structures through which people professionals communicate evidence to decision-makers.