Australian Financial Security Authority futureproofs workforce with Tableau data hub

The Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA) is an executive agency in the Attorney-General’s portfolio, with broad-ranging services aimed at securing Australia’s economic health and security, ranging from regulating the personal insolvency sector through to managing economically significant registers/key pieces of Australia’s credit infrastructure which support secured lending in Australia.

The adoption of enterprise-wide self-service analytics at AFSA was significantly impacted by the work AFSA’s Human Resources (HR) team have done in the workforce analysis and analytics space. Assistant Director - Workforce Analytics and Planning Adina Leu, and Director – Applications Services Richard Datson shared how Tableau became a one-stop-shop for all people managers to access reliable insights on their workforce, helping them make operational and strategic decisions whilst continuing to build high-performing, happy and productive teams.
Major time savings achieved with Tableau also helped the Workforce Analytics and Planning team move into advanced workforce planning with predictive and prescriptive workforce data modelling, and monitoring internal and external trends to maximise opportunity and minimize risk.

Tableau has changed the way the Workforce Analytics team delivers services to stakeholders, allowing them to access timely workforce data that is automatically refreshed daily, shares Richard. About four years ago, before Tableau, managers had access to very limited workforce data provided to them by the HR team only a few times a year. Without timely information, AFSA’s managers struggled to make effective decisions about their workforce.

With automated reports now updating daily, and monthly reports optimised with dashboards updating previous month’s data on the very first day of every month, AFSA’s Workforce Analytics team has gained capacity to respond to more reporting needs, provide more services (such as analysis and analytics) and reach broader audiences in the organisation with the same amount of resources.

In fact, Adina shares that Tableau has “almost entirely reduced ad-hoc workforce reporting, saving resources equivalent to 1 full-time employee”, which was invested in higher-value activities for the business. The only ad-hoc workforce data and reporting requests the team are currently receiving are in relation to non-standard external requests (such as Parliamentary questions on notice or ministerial briefings) - and even then, the team is able to quickly retrieve the answers via Tableau at their fingertips, she adds.

When it comes to communicating with internal governance bodies (e.g.: AFSA’s Risk and Operational Management Committee or the Board), timely workforce data and insights are equally critical for organisational risk management and decision making. Before using Tableau, AFSA’s HR Reporting Team would take up to two weeks to create a static report based on snapshot workforce data; by the time the particular committee convened, the data would have become month-old and out of date.

“Right now, with Tableau, they discuss based on workforce data that’s accurate, reliable and updated overnight,” says Adina.

The Workforce Analytics team works with 6 years of workforce data for their workforce, updated daily from the source HR system into AFSA’s enterprise data warehouse.

“Connecting Tableau directly to 6 years' worth of our workforce data gives us a solid base for reliable forecasting, which is especially important for workforce size management,” says Adina. As a Federal Government agency, AFSA is subject to a staffing cap and needs to be able to optimise resources and minimise service delivery risks arising from workforce availability shortages.

Therefore by providing managers, leaders, HR Business Partners and the wider HR team with visibility into not only the current state of the workforce, but also future trends and forecasts, Tableau workforce dashboards offer a key input into workforce planning conversations.

With the additional capacity gained from providing managers with access to self-service workforce data, the Workforce Analytics team can now deliver deeper insights such as labour market trends and environmental scanning to help senior leaders define what their future workforce should look like in terms of capabilities needed, current gaps and opportunities and plans to mitigate immediate and longer term risks.

“Tableau has significantly increased AFSA’s maturity in the workforce reporting and analytics space, and this is a key component to advanced and effective workforce planning to meet the agency’s future workforce capacity and capability demands,” shares Adina.

“Apart from workforce data, the data warehouse has data from AFSA’s various case management systems. This data combined with HR data allows AFSA to report on workforce performance based on various demographics such as location and team function. This reporting is also available via Tableau”, shares Richard.

This has made Tableau the go-to tool for staff across AFSA’s business lines to access the data they need for operational and strategic planning.
“Through using Tableau, we discovered that our users were keen to have visibility into and take ownership of their data to make evidence-based decisions,” Adina observes.
Building a strong partnership with Richard’s Data Warehouse and Reporting team has been key to the delivery of our workforce analysis and analytics program of work, adds Adina.

Moving forward, as staff and managers become more accustomed to utilising Tableau as a “one-stop-shop” for workforce data, Adina hopes that more Tableau champions can venture into more advanced analytics for their own teams, such as the predictive modelling that her Workforce Analytics team or Richard’s Data Warehouse team are currently doing for business units.

“With the growing importance of data and analytics in the modern business landscape, HR teams need to deliver greater value by providing actionable insights through powerful visualisations and storytelling that can reach broad audiences.”

“Tableau has certainly delivered a mechanism to do so,” Adina says.