Workforce Analytics is Reinventing HR

Introduction to Workforce Analytics

Today, the need to understand what attracts skillful individuals to join an organization, stay motivated, and deliver outstanding results has become more important than ever. However, this is not a task which can be shouldered by the HR team alone; they need the right tools to deliver optimal results.

Over the years, organizations around the globe have spent billions of dollars on employee performance analysis, talent recruitment, leadership training, and development. However, these investments have rarely delivered the desired results. To tackle these thorny issues, companies have started investing in sophisticated data analytics tools coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to add to their HR department.

HR Analytics or People Analytics are statistical tools or methods used to measure and organize employee related data to give clean insights into the performance and productivity of an employee. People Analytics help companies to monitor record and analyze data of specific candidates with specific skill sets, this helps in reducing cost, optimizing recruitment and improving talent quality. For any organization, their workforce is their most precious asset. Therefore, it is extremely important to analyze, assess, and predict staffing requirements.

“I believe that the data will set you free. At the end of the day, it’s about how do you turn those pieces of information into insights that will improve business.” – Steven Rice, Executive VP, Human Resources, Juniper Networks

Let us look at how people analytics help businesses grow:

In order to use workforce analytics effectively, you should know what is going on in your data. Once you know how to use your data, it is easier to achieve your goals.

Better talent recruitment

Data Analytics sift through huge chunks of data pertaining to a candidate’s resume and highlight relevant qualities or skills that can contribute to the company’s culture and mission. It also helps in identifying high-risk characteristics in a candidate’s profile which can be filtered right at the beginning of the screening process. They also help in scheduling interviews and answer basic candidate questions in real-time.

Employee satisfaction

Workforce Analytics enables companies to predict employee satisfaction or any other employee-related problem if any. They provide HR professionals with the ability to tap information through surveys, interviews, customer feedback, performance reviews, and social media data and analyze the data to make better HR decisions.

Identify and develop top talent

Companies which fail to identify and maximize leadership metrics have been a major factor that contributes to failed leadership development initiatives. The success of the ROI of leadership training depends on the efforts of development initiatives to the actual results delivered. Data Analytics provides valuable insights into how the employees learn and understand from training materials and suggest appropriate changes.

Reduce churn

Employee churn is a big problem which most businesses grapple with; they reduce business agility and negatively impact a company’s productivity. HR Analytics help organizations in knowing when the employee shows signs of leaving, and place projections to migrate that effect – particularly in his first year when the organization invests heavily on them for training and development.

Improve performance and engagement

Employee engagement is running at an all-time low over the last few years and most employees are not engaged on the job. Researchers suggest that engagement surveys are inaccurate and give us a completely different picture. Data Analytics provides organizations with invaluable insights by identifying engagement activities which have the biggest impact on the performance of the employee.

Structure compensation

When an organization has all the information that is required to determine an employee’s performance, it is very easy for them to structure compensation packages. Workforce Analytics helps the organizations in considering factors like the likelihood of the employee remaining with the company for a reasonable period of time, his skill, domain, education, certifications, experience and other factors.

Trigger alerts

Some employees have issues which are severe and more important than lack of engagement, like stress, anxiety, depression, etc. Data Analytics help in identifying such high-risk employees so that intervention initiatives can be taken early. Such employees show a drastic change in productivity, behavior, and rate of absenteeism and are filtered using data analytics.

Conclusion

While we would always need a human-in-the-loop to make important HR decisions, smart data analytics systems can make their job a whole lot easier and accurate. Recruitment today is all about finding talent through technology medium. However, this technology will keep getting better and these organizations will need to keep updating themselves and stay digitally savvy.

Data Analytics provides HR professionals with the ability to tap valuable information and analyze the data to make better HR decisions, and it’s clearly the way forward in 2019.

This article is written by Swati Gupta from Splashbi.