The report, which calls on a survey of 200 CEOs, MDs and C-level business leaders, reveals that over half (56%) use ‘gut feel’ when making decisions related to hiring new staff and managing the workforce. This is often due to the growing speed of decision making, with nine out of ten leaders (90%) saying they must now make decisions “in-real time.”

Faced with this quick-fire decision making, many leaders don’t have time to analyse the data provided by teams like IT and HR, instead turning to intuition and ‘gut feel’. Three in five business leaders (61%) frequently make ‘snap decisions’ without reviewing the available data, while more than half (58%) say they rely on gut feel because it’s too difficult to access insights in real time.

Concerningly from an HR perspective, the report finds that these decisions are most likely to concern the hiring and firing of staff:

• People management (73%)
• Expanding and managing the workforce (56%)
• Market expansion (53%)
• New products (52%)
• Budgets and investments (45%)
• New processes and technologies (42%)

Despite this high reliance on intuition, the report shows most leaders would rather inform their decisions with data. Of those surveyed, 84% want to make more decisions based on accurate data. To address this, 77% are now investing in real-time data streaming tech to help inform their decisions with data.

Commenting on these findings, Richard Timperlake, SVP of EMEA, Confluent, said: “Across the UK, businesses are having to choose between fast decisions and informed decisions. That shouldn’t be the case. Today’s leaders and CEOs need to know that they can access a full, accurate picture of their organisations in real-time. The move to data streaming is an essential part of that shift.”

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