People Analytics and Insights Expert

Can you lead, influence, and deliver? Do you have the ability to combine strong analytical capabilities with leadership to manage high-impact analytical projects? If so, then then we want to hear from you! This role is within the People Analytics and Insights team at Defra Group. You will join a team of 16 analysts, working alongside three other supportive Grade 7 (G7) colleagues. This newly created G7 position will provide operational and day-to-day leadership to help strengthen the team's impact. Our team is responsible for delivering the data analysis and insights that shape our business, people strategies, and policies. Under the guidance of the Grade 6 (G6) Head of People Analytics and Insight, the G7's will help transform the function and operationalise key principles such as professionalising the analytical function, ensuring consistency and transparency in our work, and delivering improved services to our users. This role will expand the team's scope beyond the current core people analysis tasks. You'll help enhance the reporting of statutory and other key metrics, while also exploring the drivers of staff behaviour and organisational performance. Additionally, you'll monitor and evaluate the impact of organisational policies on our people. You'll have the opportunity to shape the future of People Analytics by contributing your ideas, analytical expertise, and leadership skills. This role offers a unique opportunity to continue conducting hands-on analysis, including in-depth insight projects, while also developing your leadership and management capabilities. Your work will be key in influencing strategic decisions across the organisation. As a vital member of our team, you will play a crucial role in delivering actionable insights and analysis across Defra group. Your expertise will drive data-driven decision-making, ensuring that stakeholders in HR and beyond have the necessary information to achieve their objectives effectively. Across government the People Analytics profession are setting ambitions to:

• Professionalise and upskill our capability;
• Collaborate across government to standardise the calculation of metrics and knowledge share;
• Champion people analytics within organisations to enhance understanding of the potential to significantly impact business outcomes;
• Invest in better data and systems.
Within Defra we are fortunate in having a supportive environment, where we have been able to make strides towards all of these, by:
• Seeking for our analysts to be badged within a profession of the Government Stats Group (GSG) or Government Social Research (GSR) on entry, or supporting their journey to become badged; providing time and resource for learning, such as use of Power BI, as well as significant on-job opportunities to develop these skills;
• Working with the pan-government People Data and Analytics Delivery (PDAD) group;
• Engaging with a broad range of stakeholders including senior leaders of 6 diverse organisations through a Group Corporate Services agreement, HR Business Partner's (HRBP's), Expert Service providers, and line managers, with opportunities to influence product development and use, and project commissioning;
• Investing in a data repository build (with opportunities to work alongside the data architects and build team); automating our work where possible and providing enhanced visualisation using Power BI (with access to additional analysis tools including R Python).
In this role you will have the opportunity to play a part in continuing and shaping all these critical work strands. This will include the design of Power BI products to deliver key insights on specific aspects of the employee journey (e.g. recruitment; absence reports; survey insights and employee value proposition) as well as deep dive projects drawing together insights from a range of datatypes (e.g. management information and survey data). You will have a chance to hone your stakeholder engagement skills, developing propositions for the business to support others (including HRBPs and the Defra Group Senior Leadership team) in their work, and you will need to understand data management in the round, including data cleansing, storage, and governance. For all data processing, you will need to understand and apply the legal obligations that flow from GDPR, while for some tasks you will also need to adhere to best practice GSR and GSG guidelines pertaining to informed consent and participation. In addition, alongside other government departments we are embarking on a significant change to the sourcing and delivery of our key data within a 3-4 year timescale. This will require us to influence the platform design and build team to ensure that the data we receive is well defined at the point of data entry; that report datasets are fit for purpose; and that any automation support both centralised and local data analysis. Given the range of activities required of the G7 leadership team there is scope to shape the role. Currently the existing G7s lead each of three work pillars - repository build, governance, automation of analysis. These can be refocused and there will be an opportunity to consider preferences across the leadership team. This role requires a blend of analytical skill, creativity, and a customer-centric mindset to deliver impactful outcomes in a dynamic environment.

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