Why data democratisation is crucial for employee engagement

Behind its people, data is the most valuable asset in any business today and the need to accommodate and leverage real-time data is increasing as fast as the volume of data itself. In 2023, it’s no longer viable for data to be owned by business leaders, IT departments and data analysts. Nor is it viable for this data to exist in siloes across an organisation.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way. The ongoing advancement of technology and data analytics tools over the past decade has meant that data can be shared and interpreted by non-data experts, HR included. It can be put to work across an entire organisation and bring immense benefits to departments, teams and individuals through data democratisation.

What is data democratisation?

Data democratisation is the process of enabling data to pass freely from the hands of data specialists to everyone in a business.

This isn’t about opening the floodgates of data to all employees to decipher and act upon. Data democratisation is an ongoing process to enable employees to interpret and understand the data relevant to them and to confidently make data-driven decisions on a daily basis. If executed correctly through the right training, protocols and data governance, data democratisation can bring immense benefits to an organisation and its people.

Here are the five key benefits:

1. Cost saving and increased revenue

Equipping an organisation with relevant data from the C-suite to the factory floor can streamline tasks, save time, help uncover new insights and in turn, reduce costs and increase revenue.

Placing data into the hands of CFOs and finance teams can help organisations utilise financial resources more efficiently and achieve business growth.

2. Better decision making

Placing relevant and actionable data in the hands of all departments in an organisation can facilitate better and faster decision making.

Teams can pivot quickly and confidently as decisions are easily justifiable.

3. Coordination and consistency

The easier and faster that stakeholders can access data to get the business insights they need without assistance from data specialists the better.

4. Empowering workforce planning

Providing access to data and analytics to support workforce decisions including resourcing and recruitment is useful.

5. Better targeted marketing efforts

As we move into uncertain economic times, utilising data can aid in making every dollar in the marketing budget count in 2023 through hyper-targeted marketing.

6. Increased employee satisfaction

An increase in productivity, along with trusting and enabling employees to utilise relevant data ultimately improves employee engagement as they are able to do their job more productively and produce higher quality work because they have the right data when they need it.

When people perform at a higher level, they not only get more out of their work, they tend to stay longer in a role as they are able to add value.

As the world continues to digitise, the role and value of data will only become more essential to employee engagement, and data democratisation can be a game changer if executed correctly.

Peter Steggall is the vice president of Domo APAC, and Simon Cropper is the director of HR and talent management of Domo, APAC, Japan and India