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The importance of HR and People Analytics in Business

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Abhiram Mehara
The importance of HR and People Analytics in Business

For years, the Human Resources (HR) Department has been viewed as an out-of-date, fluffy, fuddy-duddy department, not to mention one of the least popular in any organisation. A lot of the work used to be done based on intuition. To determine the various workforce metrics, data had to be cobbled together from multiple spreadsheets or cumbersome systems. It was also difficult to quantify and evaluate the HR Department's success.

With the introduction of sophisticated, cloud-based analytics tools that assist the HR department, such obstacles have become a thing of the past. Data from these tools enable us to use data in a timely and efficient manner to make better organisational decisions regarding its people.

People Analytics

People analytics is a data-driven, goal-oriented approach to studying all people's processes, functions, challenges, and opportunities at work to improve these systems and achieve attainable success. People analytics, also known as talent analytics or HR analytics, uses statistics and other data interpretation techniques to help people make better decisions. At all stages of an employee's career, smarter, more strategic, data-driven decisions are unquestionably the way to a rewarding journey.

How Can People Analytics Help the Business?

By providing better insight into learning and development, performance management, and organisational decisions, people analytics can help an organisation meet its business needs. HR departments will be instrumental in improving employee development needs, staff morale, and business ROI if people analytics are used effectively. 

The major advantages of using people analytics are

Makes Acquiring Talent More Effective

Companies nowadays prefer candidates who fit the company's culture over those who are talented and/or qualified. The historical data on candidates provides a lot of insight into which candidates fit the existing workplace culture. It also eliminates any implicit biases that may arise during the manual selection process.

Retention

Using various machine learning algorithms, people analytics can help identify churn patterns. This enables Human Resource management to be proactive and take the appropriate actions. Data analytics, on the other hand, aids in the establishment of areas of setup, structure, and culture that make a company appealing to employees. Employee engagement, productivity, and retention can all be improved by focusing on these factors.

Improved Productivity

People analytics aid in the identification of factors that influence productivity. They assist in the development of HR strategies, such as training, performance management, and other HR policies.

Compensation

It is simple to structure compensation packages once the organisation has all of the performance management-related data for employees.

Employee Satisfaction

People analytics tools aid in the collection of data via feedback forms, surveys, interviews, performance reviews, and customer feedback, among other methods, to make better HR decisions.

Improve Employee Training

Getting the best employees in the industry shouldn't just be about hiring and assisting them with their transition. The organization's culture should also encourage an employee's engagement development through various training programmes. People analytics enters the picture to provide the information needed to determine the best training programmes for each employee.

Common Data Sources for HR Analytics 

 

Common data sources include internal data like, 

  1.  Demographic employee data
  2.  Payroll data
  3.  Social network data
  4.  Performance data 
  5.  Engagement data

External data sources include labour market data, population data, LinkedIn data, and so on. 

Process of People Analytics

 

The people analytics process should follow these nine steps to ensure success in the endeavour.

 

Plan

Develop the analytics activity's goals and objectives. Make a list of the requirements and questions that must be answered as part of the process.

Define the Critical Success Factors

Define the metrics that will be used to determine whether the project was a success. This could be based on factors such as the project's impact, user feedback, and so on.

Data Audit

Create a map of the data that is currently available and assign a quality rating to it. This will reveal any data gaps if any, and those that must be filled before moving forward.

Design the Process

Define roles and set objectives for team members. 

Design the Data Collection Strategy

Design the collection and processing stages for the analytics activity.

Data Collection

Gather information from all possible sources. It can be derived from existing data sets or by implementing new data collection methods.

Analyse Data

Analyse the data to derive insights in the form of recommendations and guidance for the data's users.

Report Data

A report in a clear, simple manner, illustrating solutions to any issues that may have arisen, as well as any additional areas of investigation that may be required.

Evaluate

Examine and evaluate the data analytics data insight process. As needed, review and update the process.

Choosing the Correct Analytics

 

There are a variety of options for deploying people analytics for an organisation, including those from Microsoft, Tableau, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, and others.

While determining the best fit for any organisation, keep in mind that the solution should provide the organisation with a dashboard that is tailored to the organization's needs. It's also critical that the information gathered can be used by a variety of stakeholders, including the finance, HR, and IT departments.

Analytics managers will be able to pull information from dashboards that provide smart solutions using graphics and analytics custom reports. The following are some important considerations to make when making a decision:

System Customization and Scalability

It is important to choose a system that is flexible and allows you to modify the existing work processes.

User-Friendly Interface

The system being chosen should not be too complex, such that employees will not need any training to understand how the system works.

Reliable Support

Before making a choice, it is necessary to check on the reliability and knowledge of the service providers when obtaining technical support.

Takeaways

Organizations can delve deeper into the behavioural aspects of work, understand the cause-and-effect relationship between different human and non-human aspects of work, and make better decisions using the latest people analytics and workforce analytics solutions.

The three most important things to remember here are to understand what data needs to be quantified and qualified, to be aware of current trends, and to be aware of the end goals.

Using actionable insights from people analytics to position a company for exceptional growth is a sure bet.

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