We’re living in an exciting time for HR – new developments in people analytics and HR technology are happening every day.
Slowly but surely, those of us at the forefront of the HR tech world are pushing people analytics into the spotlight of business strategy, with HR practitioners finally having the analytics tools under their belt to report on employee engagement, absences, wellbeing and more. If your business is still relying on guesswork to justify people expenses and drive key decisions, HR technology is the solution for you.
In Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2020, “53% of organizations reported that their leaders’ interest in workforce information has increased in the past 18 months. The desire for better workforce metrics spans a diverse set of needs that mostly focus on the future, with information on the readiness of the workforce to meet new demands the clear leading priority.”
No longer are people analytics tools simply for HR departments, but instead they are transforming businesses and contributing to the bottom line – justifying the need to support a winning workplace culture and promote employee wellbeing. Using analytics, HR professionals can prove the correlation between employee data and business data, demonstrating that they are intrinsically linked at every step of the business process.
So where do you start with people analytics?
First, you need to define the questions your business needs answers to. Determine what your goals are as a business on a short- and long- term basis. This will be a starting point to define employee data related questions such as: What are our most efficient and quality recruiting sources? Who are our top talent and how can we retain them? Once you’ve identified your key questions, you’ll be better able to focus your analysis.
Second, you need to gather the key data and metrics you need the most. This has proven to be difficult for HR departments who have data in multiple systems or spreadsheets – the need to have all your data in an all-in-one HR system like Youmanage will increase as you delve further into your HR analytics strategy. Data accessibility is imperative to any good data analysis, and without it, your results will likely be limited and uninformative.
So, now you’re set up with your questions and data, what are the key metrics you can start using today to drive key business decisions?
1. Turnover
Not only do HR analytics tools allow you to measure past staff turnover – you can utilise this information to predict risk for the future, modelling the scenarios to predict future losses. Using these metrics your HR team can safeguard against a poor retention of staff, saving your business vast amounts on recruitment overheads every year. Perhaps you will be able to identify trends within high turnover months – what does this mean in terms of retention strategy?
2. Diversity & Inclusion
Your HR department should always treat diversity as a major priority. Negative publicity through an employee’s experience, or a lack of inclusion at the interview stage, could cost your business big bucks in the long term. Utilise HR metrics like salary by gender or age to reveal pay discrepancies you might otherwise overlook. And, generate reports of recent candidates to assess whether a diverse pool of applicants is being considered for various roles within your company.
Within Youmanage, you can set up a specific diversity and inclusion report, giving you real-time information in a graphical format whenever you need to report on diversity stats and drive change across the business. Export and print it for meetings, or use the graphics to present to your directors.
3. Productivity
What if you could measure your employees’ productivity levels every month? Well, HR software allows you to do exactly that – you can report on overtime hours, training undertaken and sickness days taken, per employee or per department, to give you an insight into how your employees are getting on. Identify employee pain points and develop a strategy to solve them.
Combine this with a collaborative workload management tool like Monday.com or Asana to track your employees’ individual task list, noting their efficiency at completing their weekly or daily tasks. You can also follow this up with file notes under an employee’s record to keep track of their progress over a longer period.
4. Wellbeing
As remote work becomes the new normal for many businesses, increased efforts should be undertaken to ensure your employees are feeling happy both in their roles and outside of them. Employee surveys are a great way to report on wellbeing easily – generate surveys and notify your employees to undertake them, then view and export the results in graphical formats like pie charts and line graphs. This will give you a better overall picture of your employees’ state of wellbeing, and identify areas of improvement that could cause a domino effect, increasing their productivity and driving more sales and revenue to the business as a result.
Once you’ve gathered all your data and formatted it into reporting systems that are useful for all departments, you can share it with directors and managers to contribute towards making those key decisions. And, because you have good quality data to back up these decisions, you know you’re making the right choices.
But don’t stop there! Once you’ve gathered these key business insights its time to turn them into actionable interventions. Develop a strategy moving forward to improve each of these individual metrics over the next month, quarter or year, and make sure to get your whole team on board in driving this change across the business.
Did you find this article useful? Youmanage is a HR software platform providing embedded guidance, compliance and automation at every step of your day-to-day HR and business activities. Take out a free 30-day trial, or book a free demo with our Support Team for more information.
