Positive Business Results From People Analytics
People analytics isn’t just a passing technological trend—it’s a day-to-day staple for many HR departments around the world.
Business leaders in various industries are applying this practice to help enhance work environments and improve the employee experience. This is affirmed in past and present studies, one of which Deloitte conducted back in 2017 where 70% of companies consider people analytics to be of the greatest importance—you can imagine that number has since increased amongst human resource departments today. People analytics has been proven to advance the employee journey, offering insights and observation that leads to better business strategies and outcomes.
Despite an awareness of the power and prominence of people analytics, its inherent value can be offset with warranted suspicion on the part of employees. After all, no one wants to lose their sense of individuality and forced to become just a number or statistic. As this practice is adopted and expanded into more companies, its advantages—for both the employer and employee—will continue to unfold, revealing ways to empower workers and play to their strengths.
Let’s explore some positive business results directly attributed to people analytics so you can see for yourself the value of this nuanced practice and its many advantages.
Retention is crucial for the success of any company—thankfully, people analytics offers a useful solution through predictive modeling. Back in 2009, Google began developing an advanced algorithm to define retention-risk employees. Now nearly a decade later, this technology has advanced, helping employers can pinpoint possible employees who would be at risk to leave. Naturally, with the steep cost of acquisition rising every year, this could be a critical tool in maintaining high talent and taking determinative steps not to let it walk out the front door.
Additionally, people analytics can spotlight specific roles and positions that lend themselves to frequent turnover. By highlighting branches, divisions and departments that suffer from low retention, HR departments are able to get to the source of specific problem areas. For example, through using analytics, Children’s Health discovered that some of its hospitals had a drastically higher than normal first-year turnover rate than others. This led to making improvements in salary and working conditions, which reduced that turnover in those hospitals from 17.8% to 15.3%.
Similarly to retention is also the topic of analytics facilitating better hiring choices. By utilizing data to anticipate future performance, you can bring on the cream of the crop in terms of talent who will thrive the best within your organization. Clearly, these tools are above and beyond the capabilities of traditional personality tests, providing insight and clarity so employers can make the best decision right out the gate.
At the onset, this allows you to avoid the negative consequences of a bad hire, which can lead to a cavalcade of problems—low company morale, decreased productivity, a tarnished brand—just to name a few. What analytics takes into effect is not just a person’s resume or employment history, but particular aspects of their performance, both on an individual and team level. Additionally, measuring up these statistics with those of your top performers to create sample scenarios bring about further clarity in the hiring process.
Now that we’ve discussed getting quality employees in the door and doing everything you can to keep them in the door, the next logical aspect of this would lead to employee satisfaction. Traditionally, HR has managed morale and enthusiasm through workplace surveys, but as you can imagine, people analytics takes this one step further, providing a more holistic perspective to office engagement and general fulfillment.
Analysis technology is able to monitor behaviors as well as movements within organizations. Email analytics alone has been used to determine high performing sales teams with statistics revealing positive internal relationships that lead to better performance. Similarly, toxic behaviors can also be pinpointed and addressed. Recently Keen Corp, a prominent analytics firm, performed a study using content from email archives from Enron to cultivate employee engagement heat maps. This naturally led to better insight and behavior and communication that led to tangible results. Additionally, analytics can reveal organizational subcultures, identifying where cultural shortcomings or inequities may exist.
Finally, this practice enables better decision-making, as you’re basing the bulk of your determinations on outcome-oriented statistics, avoiding the pitfalls subjectivity and unconscious bias. It could even be said that people analytics is the difference between taking a blind leap of faith and making a fact-based judgment. After all, good business decisions demand solid data, which saves time and money when faced with the bottom line. Analytics can also ensure more diversity, a common goal amongst most companies, by focusing on departments and roles where that may be lacking.
At the end of the day, enhancing your organization through people analytics practices can help HR departments better understand the employee experience to give way to a great employee experience. With improvements made to this technology every day, you can be sure you will reap its rewards through a better work environment and thriving business.
Advice on How to Enhance Workplace Collaboration
Business leaders, HR departments and those who work in talent management know how synonymous workplace collaboration is with success.
According to Salesforce, 86% of employees and executives cite lack of communication and collaboration for nearly all workplace failures. While this statistic shouldn’t come as a surprise, data analysis continues to shine light on the importance of teamwork as it relates to performance management. According to ProofHub, 99.1% of employees prefer a workplace where people identify and discuss issues truthfully and effectively, yet ClearCompany claims that only 5.9% of companies communicate goals daily. It seems a disparity between interactive participation and its presence in company culture can prevent even the highest performers from doing their very best, which leads us to question: What’s the optimal way to enhance workplace collaboration?
To begin with, old school monthly meetings and yearly trust exercises no longer cut it. It’s important for Human Resources to build meaningful open communication and an authentic sense of trust; thankfully, research shows there are proven up-to-date ways to do it. Let’s explore some of these methods and shed a light on best collaborative practices so your team will produce real results.
First and foremost, better communication is enhanced when people can feel free and open to tell their story. In doing so, empathy is cultivated and a deeper sense of someone’s journey is brought to the surface, creating not just a colleague, but a three-dimensional human being. Companies, on the whole, have a story to tell, so enabling team members to speak openly and honestly about theirs strengthens and unifies the organization moving forward. This is especially pertinent to newer team members and helps to combat their reticence to express their ideas—and themselves—more fully.
Second, it’s always a great idea to equip your office with a collaboration portal accessible to the whole team. Ultimately, these systems facilitate open sharing of important documents and even video conferences searchable by a relevant topic or skill. This really enhances workplace unity across different departments, as it enables a digital hub or “online office space” where workers feel connected by easily accessible information. This is an ideal means of tracking projects, as well as posting about internal tasks, questions and policy alterations.
Common collaborative portals would be Slack, Trello and Microsoft Teams. Thankfully, many of these are also available in app form for mobile devices and smart phones, so you can answer quick questions and track down important information while on the go. Some even feature integrations with apps like Dropbox and Google Docs, streamlining efficacy and enabling everyone to be on the same page—literally!
Third, engagement is critical, which is why many companies suggest pairing younger employees with older mentors. This bridges more venerated workers with less experienced ones and facilitates a professional relationship that may otherwise never have been initiated. In addition, mentors can actually help reduce turnover rates, as they can help other employees work through frustrations and problem points. Few can discount the value of such personalized counseling, especially as it helps prepare many for future leadership roles.
Fourth, defining and communicating team goals on a regular basis is vital to true teamwork and collaboration. Many suggest discussing such goals on a weekly if not daily basis. Whether that takes the shape of workplace morning huddles or Monday team lunches, reminding a team of common objectives keeps everyone productive and feeling part of a group. Also, this helps reduce silos, which can cause rifts and even fractures within an office community.
Fifth, what better way to teach a team how to work together than to lead by example? By demonstrating collaborative behavior, you are showing your team how to treat one another and work with collective ideas. Ultimately, this means displaying cooperation and effective communication, which filters down to your team members and becomes part of their own habits. A great way to begin this is by making time for one-on-one sessions with each of your team members. This gives you a chance to listen and respond to questions and concerns, illustrating firsthand how best to listen and respond when working together.
Sixth, you want to get teams out of the office. Whether this means socializing outside of work or planning off-site team-building activities, you want to strengthen and enhance these relationships beyond the walls or cubicles they frequent. Learning to associate with one another as people, as humans, through learning about mutual and shared interests will go a long way towards facilitating cohesive teamwork. On the whole, this can boost interdependence and communication, regardless it’s a quick cocktail after work or a team outing at the local bowling alley. Forgo the old warning of “mixing business with pleasure” and find like-minded and fun activities that bring you together as people, not just colleagues.
Regardless of your data-driven approach or researched analytics in HR, case studies show time after time that these means of bringing employees together contribute to workplace collaboration tenfold. By bringing your team together with open communication, you’re able to work towards a common goal and boost productivity—something employees and employers both value greatly.