Reddit mentions of Evidence-Based Management: How to Use Evidence to Make Better Organizational Decisions

This is a great mentality, and you are learning a lot already.

As you spend more time in this role, the work that takes you 70-80% of your time should take less. You should be able to finish some work faster, automate things (cleaning data in R may be faster if you can run scripts on consistent data that shows up in the same places every time, etc), and prevent issues so you don't have to deal with things breaking as much.

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The next stage you can move to, broadly speaking, is helping your company make evidence-based decisions that increase the effectiveness of their organization. I've put some links here that can help you explore this approach; it's not a huge leap from what we study, but it does show you a systematic process for making evidence-based decisions that you can use to add value for your organization.

https://www.cebma.org/

Evidence Based Management book

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One example of helping your company make evidence-based decisions is to understand why people leave. For this, you can look to the scientific evidence (I added a link to an evidence summary below), use your organization's data (so building a model like you mentioned), speak with practitioners in your company (reach out to people in talent management and learn what they've experienced regarding turnover in their time with the company), and speak to stakeholders who are affected by retention interventions (like employees, HR, line managers, etc).

https://scienceforwork.com/blog/evidence-based-employee-turnover/

All these sources of evidence will help you make a full report on 1) existing predictors of turnover in the literature, 2) which predictors matter of the ones you have (but recognize that your company may not collect high-quality variables to use in the model, like commitment, reliable and predictive measures of engagement, motivation, etc), 3) what practitioners in the company know and recommend, and 4) what the people affected think about the state of turnover in the organization.

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Then you can turn your focus to solving retention issues, if it's a priority in your company. Then I'd recommend looking to other articles from scienceforwork.com, other research papers, and reading books on behavioural design and nudging (making small changes in the organization to change behaviour and increase desired outcomes. After developing solutions that have a strong foundation and have worked before, you want to measure their impact (ideally with a controlled test). Happy to provide articles on this too.

After addressing turnover from a challenge and a solution perspective, you could move on to another key "people challenge" in your company - maybe it's teamwork, leadership development, recruitment, or anything else we can cover. You can use the same approach to tackle that, and evaluate the impact of those solutions. Before you know it, you'll have a whole diagnosis, solution development, and impact evaluation engine running that can help your company make better people decisions for a lot cheaper and a lot faster (because you won't be chasing useless fads) than they otherwise would. Good luck!