MHRM 6101 Week 7 HRIS Question Inventory Brief Example

Twelve Questions Leadership Asked and What Kestrel's HR Records Can Answer: An HRIS Brief Sorting Each Into Answerable Now, Answerable if Entered and Not Held

Student Name

Walden University

MHRM 6101: Foundations of Human Resource Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Twelve Questions Leadership Asked and What Kestrel's HR Records Can Answer: An HRIS Brief Sorting Each Into Answerable Now, Answerable if Entered and Not Held

The Question That Started This

Last quarter the chief executive asked why the Obetz night shift keeps losing operators. HR at Kestrel, the logistics firm in this course's composite case, could report how many had left but not why, which shift they had worked longest or who had supervised them. This brief takes that failure as a prompt to test the system against every workforce question leadership has asked in the past year.

The Inventory

Table 1

Leadership's Questions and What the HR System Can Answer

Composite organization; field completion from a January audit.

What the Inventory Shows

The finding is lopsided. Everything finance and payroll depend on is complete: pay, positions, hire dates. Everything that explains why people leave is missing or partial. Five of the twelve questions can be answered today, four could be answered if existing fields were filled consistently and three need data the system does not hold.

That pattern matches what Angrave et al. (2016) observed across many organizations: HR systems tend to be built around transactions such as paying people, not around the questions managers ask about them. Marler and Boudreau (2017) found in their review that HR analytics depends first on reliable, connected data, and that many firms attempt analysis before that foundation is in place.

Separation Reasons Come First

The separation reason field is the single most valuable fix. It already exists, it costs nothing to fill and it is blank on more than half of last year's departures because site clerks process terminations and the field is optional. Making it required, with a short list of reasons such as pay, schedule, supervisor, commute, health and other, would begin answering the night-shift question within a quarter. Pairing it with a brief exit conversation by HR rather than the site clerk would make the recorded reasons more honest. Once reasons and shifts are recorded, Kestrel can also compare its quit rate with the monthly figures for transportation and warehousing in the monthly JOLTS release (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026), which would show whether the night shift's losses are unusual for the industry or simply typical of it.

Recommendations, in Order of Cost

First, make shift and separation reason required fields and audit completion monthly. Second, add a supervisor field, which the vendor can configure without new licensing. Third, connect timekeeping to HR records, which requires a vendor project and should be priced separately. Agency headcount can be logged weekly by site clerks in the meantime.

Limits

The question list comes from leadership's requests over one year and may miss questions nobody thought to ask. Completion figures come from a single audit and may have changed since January.

References

Angrave, D., Charlwood, A., Kirkpatrick, I., Lawrence, M., & Stuart, M. (2016). HR and analytics: Why HR is set to fail the big data challenge. Human Resource Management Journal, 26(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12090

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). Job openings and labor turnover survey. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/jlt/

Marler, J. H., & Boudreau, J. W. (2017). An evidence-based review of HR analytics. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 28(1), 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2016.1244699