A strategic asset in today’s business world, people analytics is getting increasing traction. Businesses are mulling serious artificial intelligence and machine learning-based roadmaps to build robust talent management ecosystems. However, only assistance from people analytics experts can help them operationalize the desired frameworks successfully.
Analytics penetration across industries and functions has become a norm now. Organizations are keen to exploit data to discover every possible opportunity to derive an advantage.
Among the internal factors that strongly affect an enterprise’s performance, the workforce stands at the top. The more you harness your employees’ talents, the more the overall efficiency you ensure for the business; but how? Well people analytics, workforce analytics, or HR analytics, as you may like to call it, offers the answer.
This blog aims to familiarize you with how adopting people analytics can be a great strategic lever to boost your workforce’s performance.
What is People Analytics?
An HR manager, who is not so data-savvy, might very possibly encounter questions like “what does people analytics mean?” or “What is HR analytics?”
So what does people analytics actually refer to?
Today, most enterprises are data-centric. They have resource planning applications, information systems that continuously generate data. The HR function is not an exception to this. These systems generate tons of data volumes, which when subjected to relevant analysis can hand over to HR managers excellent employee insights. People Analytics bridges this gap between HR managers and data-based insights.
To put simply, people analytics or HR analytics refers to the application of analytics to derive actionable insights on the workforce, which helps improve their performance, optimize HR spend and streamlines recruiting, and offers several other uncountable benefits to the HR function.
Is people analytics difficult to implement?
Ensuring seamless coordination between technical aspects and HRs makes people analytics seemingly challenging. Emerging technologies and in-depth knowledge of HR domains are two critical factors that must work together.
However, proprietary tools now streamline the process for HR managers. These tools offer a holistic idea about workforce – performance, sentiments, perception etc. Professional consultant-led implementation is another common approach to drive implementation. For instance, ODA builds a bespoke HR analytics strategy to optimize employee life cycle –talent onboarding, and periodical performance tracking and monitoring.
How HR analytics can transform the workplace?
Successful application of people analytics brings a dramatic transformation and positively impacts all your services. As per Deloitte, 56% of organizations that have implemented people analytics have registered growth. Further stating that full-scale implementation of people analytics can reap extraordinary benefits for implementing organizations.
Here is how Google uses people analytics to create a great workplace. In Google, every people-related decision is data-driven. The company doesn’t just take into account productivity metrics, but analyses data around interpersonal relationships, cultural dynamics, leadership, and teamwork. Numerous data-based studies and experiments are conducted to continuously improve workplace quality and facilitate maximum talent utilization.
Listed below are some astonishing benefits of people analytics:
Optimized Workforce Planning
People analytics helps understand the current state of the workforce and make informed HR decisions. Statistics speak that using people analytics, the workforce planning cycle can be reduced by 25%. Additionally, hiring plan accuracy can be improved from 78% to 95%, and the accuracy of the headcount plan can be increased from 60% to 95%.
Improved Productivity
Organizations can track and monitor the time utilization trend of their employees, and come up with strategies to enhance productivity and optimize investment. Using the iterative performance measuring framework they can identify improvement areas. Healthcare organizations report saving an astonishing $500 million over three years through creating and monitoring a workforce productivity index to deliver hospital services.
Diversified Environment
Using HR data analytics, managers can easily leverage qualitative studies. The responses explain the state of diversity throughout the organization and also give an insight into each employee’s lifecycle. The free-from-bias and accurate insights prove crucial in getting visibility into diverse initiatives. Mckinsey’s research shows that a truly diverse environment boosts productivity by 35%.
High Employee Retention Rate
Gauged and tactical application of people analytics comes to the rescue of the HR function which always tries to minimize retention costs, which can be between 13%-23%. The solution is Predictive analytics. Machine learning-based forecasting accurately quantifies the likelihood of when an employee is expected to leave, and thus helps HRs to initiate requisite retention action.
Improved Talent Acquisition Efficiency
Talent analytics seamlessly improves the entire talent acquisition cycle. Using algorithmic applications, HRs can easily draw up an impartial shortlist of the most skilled resources, throughout the entire hiring process. However, only 21% of HR leaders are confident of using data-driven frameworks for acquiring the best talent, which prompts non-adopters to actively invest in people analytics.
Conclusion
Today’s chief human resource officers (CHROs) want to bring excellent data-driven people management strategies to the table. Ensuring best employee performance, long-term talent retention, and minimal HR investment are the key focus areas, to which predictive analytics holds the right answers.
As data takes the forefront, people analytics will become an integral part of the HR function. However, managing the implementation in-house is not always feasible. So, you must seek the assistance of expert HR analytics consultants to easily embed analytics in your HR and people management strategies.
Optimum Data Analytics will help you solve the purpose effectively. With ODA’s experience and expertise, you can easily implement people analytics and build a highly productive workplace.