What’s on your daily To Do list? For most of us in the fast-paced, hyper-busy 21st century office, it’s filled with assignments that are due today—or even yesterday. If it’s like most lists, it’s probably lacking any time dedicated to thinking about or implementing plans that will help your business to grow in the long term.

We’re all distracted by the demands of the day to day—the last-minute assignments, the setbacks, and the challenges that throw a wrench into our schedules. But devoting time and energy to more than just the here and now is essential to your organization’s success. In fact, an exclusive focus on the short term is one of the main reasons HR departments delay in adopting talent analytics.

While no one can predict the future—and the prospect of planning for it can be overwhelming—we’ve narrowed your long-term To Do list to the things you really need to worry about to get your talent analytics strategy in gear.

Start Planning for the Long Term Today

  1. Align Business and Talent Strategies to find out what you need to measure. Take a critical look at your organization’s objectives for the short and long term. Your talent strategy needs to be aligned with your business’s overall strategy in order to make an impact on its success. Your strategy will determine which metrics to track and how to analyze them for the results you need. Collecting data without an end goal will leave you with nothing but useless piles of numbers.
  1. Hire the Right People who understand and know how to turn data into insights. About 40% of companies indicated that they don’t have people who are experienced with using analytics. Best-in-Class organizations hire more analytical thinkers and people with a background in finance and HR, and train current staff for a whole-department transformation towards analytical thinking.
  1. Define Your Variables for data quality. All business units need to capture data using the same key term definitions and processes. Otherwise, one business unit might include part-time or temporary employees as part of their headcount while another may include full-time employees only, leading to inaccurate data and uneducated decisions.
  1. Integrate HR Systems to improve access to data. It’s difficult at best to be efficient about producing analytics when you’re drawing data from disparate sources. In fact, Aberdeen found that this is a problem for about 1/3 of all companies. By contrast, Best-in-Class organizations combine talent data with core HR data in order to directly link HCM with business outcomes.
  1. Make Use of the Cloud to access real-time data. Self-service analytics can be great in a pinch when decisions need to be made now, not next week. Cloud users are just plain faster, and indicate that they are way ahead of All Others in developing models to predict turnover and other important metrics. Research suggests that only 16.5% of organizations are currently using cloud-based analytics solutions, but 33.1% are planning to.
  1. Utilize Results from Talent Analytics to inform your “people” decisions. Once you know what you need to measure, you can collect and analyze the related data and find ways to adjust your current policies for better outcomes.

Companies that put effort into making their futures better and brighter are more likely to achieve their goals and cope with whatever unexpected changes come their way. Start thinking about the long term today—or risk being left in your competitors’ dust.