Imagine HR Owned the Data on Work

HR knows an extraordinary amount about the people in an organisation. It can tell leaders how many employees there are, what they cost, where they work, how engaged they feel and how often they leave.

Ask what work those people actually do and the answers become much less certain.

Job descriptions help up to a point. Many have not been reviewed for years. Responsibilities shift, new activities appear and people take on work that never reaches the formal description of their role. Organisation charts show who reports to whom but say little about how work is spread across teams.

The gap matters because of what HR is now being asked to deliver. In the CIPD’s HR Pulse survey of 883 UK people professionals, carried out in May and June 2026, 91% rated improving organisational performance as a high or medium priority. Only 61% said their function has clear measures of success.

For the rest of this article, imagine your HR team held an accurate, organisation-wide record of work. It shows the activities people carry out, the responsibilities they hold, the decisions they make and how all of that changes over time. Then picture six situations HR teams face regularly, with that record in your hands.

1. Understanding where organisational performance is lost

A finance function keeps missing its reporting deadlines. Headcount looks reasonable. Everyone says they are busy. The managers ask for two more people.

The usual evidence is staffing cost, turnover, absence and budget. It tells you something is wrong without telling you why.

Now imagine you can open the record of work for that function. Within minutes you notice that six people across three teams each produce a version of the same department-wide monthly report. You also see that a major supplier contract has had no clear owner since the person who managed it left in the spring.

Neither would show up on the organisation chart or in a job description.

The duplicated reports may serve different audiences. The contract may have an informal owner. The record gives you a precise starting point: which reports are needed, whether they can be combined and who should own the contract. The request for two more people becomes a conversation about how the work is organised.

Across a large organisation there may be hundreds of situations like this.

2. Finding opportunities to improve productivity

Productivity measures such as revenue per employee or output per hour show that one team or site performs differently from another. Explaining why needs a closer look at how the work is done.

Picture a hospital trust with four sites. At one, ward clerks stopped entering admissions information into several systems after an integration went in last year. At the other three, clerks still spend part of every day copying the same information between systems.

All four sites employ people with the same job title and broadly the same job description. Standard workforce reporting would show four identical groups.

Now imagine your record of work shows the difference. The activity has disappeared from one site’s clerks and remains with everyone else’s. You can ask the first site what changed, check whether the same fix would work elsewhere and estimate how much time it could release.

Research on management practices shows how much an information gap can cost. In a randomised trial across 28 textile plants in India, Nicholas Bloom and colleagues found that adopting better management practices raised productivity by 17% in the first year. The main reason the firms had not adopted those practices earlier was that they lacked information about them.

That study tested practices introduced by consultants. Large organisations can face a similar information gap internally, with an improvement in one place unknown to colleagues doing the same job elsewhere.

3. Demonstrating the value of AI investment

In October 2025 Gartner reported that 88% of HR leaders say their organisations have not realised significant business value from AI tools.

Many organisations can report AI access, usage and training completed without being able to show what the investment has changed in the work.

Picture a finance team that used to spend several days each month preparing management reports. An AI-enabled system now produces most of that information automatically. The rollout has gone well.

Now imagine you can see how the work changed afterwards. One analyst has started commercial modelling the team never had capacity for. Another has taken on additional reporting. A third is doing much the same as before, with new requests gradually filling the time the system released.

Better analysis, more reporting capacity and less pressure on staff could each be a worthwhile result. Knowing which one you got is what lets you judge the investment and decide what to do next.

In a Gartner survey of 114 HR leaders in July 2025, only 7% said their organisation gives employees guidance on how to use the time AI saves. Without a record of work, that time is hard to trace.

In a study of 5,172 customer support agents published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond found that access to an AI assistant raised productivity by 15% on average. The gains were largest for less experienced and lower-skilled workers. Gains on that scale are easier to plan for when you can see where the released time is going.

4. Managing the consequences of organisational change

Picture a business that removes a layer of team leaders to simplify its structure. The new organisation chart looks leaner. Management costs fall and consultation is complete.

The team leaders did a great deal of work their job descriptions never captured. They organised rotas, settled in new starters, resolved operational problems, handled escalations, arranged absence cover and held informal performance conversations.

Following the change, some of that work moves to managers who were already stretched. Some lands on employees who are unsure whether they have the authority to make decisions. Some simply stops because nobody realised it needed a new owner. The effects can take months to surface through falling performance, frustrated staff or operational failures.

Now imagine that before the restructure you could list every activity held in the team leader roles. You decide what continues, what can stop and who takes ownership of the rest. You check whether the receiving roles have the capacity and capability to take it on. Six months later you can see whether the work moved as planned and spot anything that disappeared without a decision.

Average team sizes are already rising. Gallup found the average number of people reporting to a US manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. In a Gartner survey of 140 CHROs in July 2025, 64% said their leaders and managers lack the mindset to lead change effectively. A clear view of the work gives leaders something concrete to plan against and check afterwards.

5. Improving employee performance and understanding culture

Picture a strong performer whose results have slipped over several months. Their manager starts to question their motivation, capability or commitment.

What the performance data does not show is how much the job has changed. The employee is covering work for an absent colleague, managing a new supplier relationship and handling several recurring tasks that were never part of their role. The expectations they are measured against have stayed the same.

Now imagine that each of those changes had been recorded as it happened. The manager would see the shift before judging the dip. The conversation could focus on priorities, whether some work should move elsewhere and what the role can reasonably deliver. It would be fairer and more useful.

The CIPD’s Good Work Index 2026, a survey of 5,074 UK employees, found that 30% say their workloads are too high.

The same record helps with recognition. Think of someone who has trained every new starter in their department for a year. It appears in no role description and has never been formally recognised. A record of that work means it can be acknowledged, built into the role if it should be and shared more fairly if it falls on too few people.

The information can also make culture easier to examine. Organisations often say they value collaboration, accountability or developing people. With a record of work you could see which roles carry coaching and mentoring, who does it informally and whether they have the time to do it properly. In a Gartner survey of 222 CHROs in July 2025, only 47% said their culture currently drives employee performance.

A record like this needs a safeguard. Employees should be able to see what is recorded about their work and challenge it. That keeps the record accurate and makes it fair.

6. Making workforce planning more accurate

Workforce plans usually start from job titles, headcount, vacancies and managers’ views of what they will need. That approach becomes less reliable when the work behind those titles is changing faster than the records that describe it.

Now imagine reviewing your finance function’s record of work over the past 18 months. Commercial modelling has become part of 24 roles that had no responsibility for it before. Production of the monthly management accounts has disappeared from 31 roles following system changes. Stakeholder engagement has grown across several teams.

These figures are illustrative of the patterns a record of work could reveal.

The spread of commercial modelling may indicate a growing need for analytical skills. The disappearance of routine reporting may free capacity that could be redeployed into that work. More stakeholder work may call for stronger communication and relationship skills.

The CIPD found that 78% of people professionals rate workforce planning and skills forecasting as a high or medium priority. Among medium and large organisations, only 61% said HR identifies the skills the organisation will need in the next one to two years. Watching how work is actually changing gives HR an additional and earlier source of evidence about what is coming.

Why HR should own the data on work

Managers understand how work is organised in their teams. Employees know what they actually do. Neither group can see the whole organisation.

HR is well placed to bring those views together. It already runs many of the processes that depend on understanding work, including job evaluation, grading, organisation design, workforce planning and parts of performance management.

Ownership would mean three things: a consistent way of describing work across the organisation, a routine for keeping it current and a simple way for managers and employees to record and confirm changes.

One distinction would be especially important. The responsibilities formally assigned to a role and the work an individual actually does are not always the same. The gap between them is where temporary arrangements, unapproved changes and unrecognised responsibilities show up.

The benefits would reach beyond HR, giving finance teams, operational leaders and employees a clearer view of how work is actually done.

Now imagine the next executive meeting. Someone asks where productivity could improve, what the AI investment has changed, whether the restructure worked or which skills the organisation will need next. HR answers with evidence about the work itself.

Most of that information already exists in the knowledge of managers and employees across the organisation. The opportunity for HR is to capture it consistently, keep it current and put it to use.

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