What is People Analytics?

The corporate world is constantly changing to fit different needs, trends, and work cultures. Companies that have realized how vital the 'people' are to their growth are gradually incorporating this method into their decision-making process. 

Also known as HR analytics, People Analytics is the data-driven method of integrating the processes, functions, challenges, and opportunities of people at work to inform decisions, improve and reinvent existing systems and achieve tenable business success.

This new HR currency is quickly becoming a game-changer, from job acceptance rates to optimized compensation to benchmarking to diversity and inclusion. With it, organizations can remove guesswork and bias from the equation and take strategic, brighter, and data-based decisions throughout the employee lifecycle - from hiring to managing performance to attrition to compensations.

Now that it's clear that this new HR currency has come to stay, let's get you started.

Getting Started With People Analytics

Ascertain your organization's readiness

Although People Analytics involves beneficial tools, software, and processes, the people responsible for approving these tools are important.

Change can be a difficult concept for organizations, especially when they can't see an immediate need. If your organization isn't fully ready to embrace change, it may not invest in an analytics platform yet.

Therefore, showing the organization the benefits of integrating HR Analytics into its processes is the first step to getting your organization ready. 

Understand your specific data needs

It is not enough to provide solutions without knowing the problems - that is why the stakeholders also need a good understanding of the critical business challenges.

Before implementations, an analysis of the desired outcome and its potential to improve performance is a great place to begin. This analysis will inform the development of a specific structure that focuses on the gaps and opportunities.

Define your questions

Defined questions allow you to establish and prioritise what areas need data analytics to thrive.

To begin, outline the business goals and identify how the HR workforce fits those goals. Secondly, curate questions to delve deeper and understand the 'whys, what’s, the who’s and the where’s.' 

As established earlier, the easiest way to get any organization on board any idea is to show its benefits. In the next paragraph, let's discuss:

Why is People Analytics important for HR?

1. Impacts employee experience

2. Improves employee performance and efficiency

3. Cost-effective recruitment and hiring processes 
   
   

1. Impacts employee experience

Employee experience starts at hiring and continues till the employee leaves. It's the total sum of what an employee feels throughout their stay in a company.

With People Analytics, you can gather insights that help the organization understand what factors affect employees positively or negatively.

By surveying metrics like employee engagement, attrition, absenteeism, etc., you'll get a better understanding where to improve employee experience and where you're already doing well.

Read more - How to reduce employee attrition with HR analytics - https://www.eqtble.com/post/employee-attrition-HR Analytics

2. Improves performance and efficiency

With efficient metric tracking, organizations can rely on unbiased insights gotten from employee data. By measuring how well various processes are performing, the HR department's efficiency is at its peak.

For example, an HR professional who decides to track attrition can use data collected over time to discover the sources that directly impact retention.

In the long run, this knowledge can highlight where to fix things, such as offer acceptance rates, employee satisfaction rates, competition, workload, etc., thus allowing you to improve performance and efficiency among employees.

3. Cost-effective recruitment and hiring processes 

Constant hiring and rehiring is not an exciting process for any company - timewise and financially. By using analytics to benchmark and monitor the recruitment methods that have worked over time and those that haven’t, you can make better hiring decisions that land the company quality hires.

This allows you to spend more time implementing processes that improve and maintain employee satisfaction and retention and less time and money trying to get the right 'hire' for a role.

Through data collected from team surveys and assessments, focus group discussions, exit interviews, satisfaction surveys, the hiring process can have less friction and provide positive results. 

Applications of People Analytics

1. Find the connection between recruitment and productivity

2. Increase employee performance

3. Enhance strategic planning

4. Work towards diversity and inclusion in the workplace

5. Apply patterns and optimize learnings
   
   

At the center of it all, People Analytics aims to provide a process that allows the organization to use accurate information to improve its overall output.

HR professionals can harness the most significant factors impacting their organization and provide a better competitive advantage with the right insights. 

While there are several HR metrics used to measure what is and what isn't working in an organization, HR can apply analytics tools in the following areas: 

1. Find the connection between recruitment and productivity

HR professionals can use People Analytics tools to identify what attributes or characteristics have over time produced quality hires that drive the realization of expected outcomes.

2. Increase Performance

With HR Analytics tools, the analysis of employee engagement and participation, lateral moves, team building, hiring, and promotion rates are a great way to discover the best ways to maximize efficiency and performance.

3. Enhance Strategic Planning

Often, unexpected situations may push companies to make drastic decisions. However, with People Analytics comes data-driven strategic planning, allowing companies to know what they require at different times, even amid uncertainty.

4. Work towards diversity and inclusion in the workplace

HR analytics tools can track diversity and inclusion. Monitoring diversity and inclusion throughout the hiring process keeps the company in check, ensuring that they are within the range of metrics that are most beneficial to the company's success.

5. Apply patterns and optimize learnings

Identify how long it takes new hires to get settled into the company and how this aligns with its goals. It'll also help inform HR on the training materials that best work for different levels of staff during onboarding – what works best and what needs improvement.

The Role Data Plays in People Analytics 

The companies that will thoroughly gain the benefits of People Analytics and succeed in it have a robust data culture. Data isn't limited to collection only; it should be analysed and used regularly to make decisions. ‍

Some of the benefits data plays include:

1. With data, HR can identify performance metrics and use informed predictive analysis to contribute and build better work models. With its ROI, HR can compare the effectiveness against other similar functions.

2. Data-driven analytics uses benchmarking to improve performance. The feedback from the accurate analysis is invaluable to any company as they can use it to improve KPIs, tactics, and processes to grow the company.  

3. Data enables HR to prioritize the programs that impact the company most positively. By identifying and collecting data from the teams and talents that get the job done when provided with certain things, the company can use that knowledge to improve its competitive advantage. 

It’s Time to Implement

Now that you understand People Analytics and it’s benefits, it is imperative to put your company’s goals and objectives first.

The best way to gain the benefits of a data-driven strategy is to align with the brand and use tools that make implementation more seamless. 

There are various tools and software that capitalize and optimize the benefits of HR analytics - one of which is eqtble. It streamlines the tracking, monitoring, and analysis of data so that multiple spreadsheets can gradually stop being part of the HR headache.

eqtble automatically works with all of your HR and HCM tools, with no code. It works with over 150 HR and human capital management systems and displays your insights on an all-in-one dashboard.

With no technical knowledge required, any HR professional can dive in and plug-in engagement, compensation, talent, and workforce data directly from the source.

Ready to use eqtble to optimise your HR analytics efforts? Click here to get started.

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