A Guide to People Analytics for Every HR to Succeed

In this guide, we’ll bring you up to speed with the possibilities offered by people analytics in the modern workplace. We’ll highlight the use of data in optimizing employee experience, the importance of people analytics in creating a better organizational structure, real-world insights from interviews with HR leaders on how to win with people analytics and people analytics tools for HR to maximize business impact.

Contents

• What is people analytics in HR
• How can HR use people analytics?
• How to use data in people analytics?
• Importance of people analytics
• An overview of people analytics tools

People analytics is all about understanding how your employees work and what they like and dislike. It’s the process of looking at things like user behavior on your website, customer surveys and reviews, sales data, employee feedback surveys, and more to get a picture of who your customers are and what they want.

An illustration signifying segregated data in the workplace.

What is people analytics?

People analytics is how companies collect and analyze data regarding their employees so they can make improved decisions on workforce planning, training and development, and performance management. The goal is to make sure that you’re making people-based decisions — and making sure they’re happy and engaged. The goal is to determine areas for improvement for managers and employees in order to enhance people-based business outcomes.

To see the power and potential of people analytics’ effectiveness, one need look no further than the wealth of recent statistical data attesting to its growing popularity. Between 2015 and 2016, there was a 29% increase in the adoption of data-driven HR decision-making, with people analytics now ranked as a high priority by 71% of businesses and very important by 31%.

People analytics, however, is still a relatively new idea for the HR industry, thus best practices are continuously being developed as businesses look for analytical solutions that best meet their unique requirements.

“People analytics has a liberating the decision-making process from the all-too-human biases that reside in all of us, which helps get you to the finish line faster – a huge plus for large organizations like RBC.”

Due to this, there are still emerging and new trends in people analytics. These themes cover a range of implementation strategies, ways to interpret and act on the results, and systems to develop a global thought process that is useful and applicable to organizations that span multiple offices, regions, or even continents.

How can HR use people analytics?

Our conversations with HR leaders in leading companies reveal a set of best-in-class ingredients that have impacted their global success and growth. According to Helena Gottschling, CHRO at the Royal Bank of Canada, the purpose of people analytics is to gain fact-based insights that’ll hold the power to enlighten and balance talent conversations.

“People analytics has a liberating the decision-making process from the all-too-human biases that reside in all of us, which helps get you to the finish line faster – a huge plus for large organizations like RBC.”

When it comes to Cognizant, the role of people analytics is to create conditions where everyone can thrive. This includes its DE&I efforts in recent years.

“We have leveraged diversity data to establish female hiring and retention goals for our top leaders,” says Becky Schmitt, executive vice president and chief people officer at Cognizant. “These goals are embedded into annual performance planning for 4,000 directors and above and are a factor in year-end reviews and ratings.”

People analytics has helped propel HR success stories at one of the world’s most admired companies, Johnson & Johnson. By enhancing their job advertising using Textio, an AI-enabled platform, JNJ has been able to boost the number of eligible applicants and the gender diversity of those who apply. In order to help their managers, make better-informed decisions, JNJ has also updated their hiring manager platform. As a result, JNJ managers now have access to information on the diversity of their candidate pool as well as other pertinent data.

“Leveraging these insights, we can demonstrate the impact of inclusive leadership across our organization and apply the learnings to how we develop talent,” says Peter Fasolo, executive vice president, CHRO at Johnson & Johnson, on the transformational value of people analytics.

In each of these examples, a breakthrough in the analytical process led to success in tackling issues at the core of recruitment, pay equity, engagement, productivity, and retention.

Whether you’re an HR manager or in the C-suite of your company, you should consider putting in place a people analytics strategy for your future growth. Leverage the power of HR analytics to increase business performance, enhance employee engagement and boost revenues.

Making sense of data in people analytics

People analytics is all about measuring the effectiveness of your workforce planning by looking into the company’s internal culture. You can do this through job-related surveys, employee satisfaction surveys, and feedback from employees on their working environments.

Employee satisfaction surveys consist of interviews that ask employees about how they feel about their jobs and the company as a whole. The goal here is to learn what’s important to your employees, which may be different from what you think it is.

You can also get employee feedback on the working environment which usually includes both anonymous comments from current employees as well as feedback from managers who work directly with these people every day. The goal here is to collect feedback about how well employees are being treated and what changes need to be made for them to feel more engaged in their jobs again (or at least move towards feeling less engaged).

Importance of People Analytics

Bearing in mind that different HR functions will need and learn how to use people analytics skills differently, we’ve looked at the distribution of people analytics capability across the industry.

Just as spreadsheets were once an essential tool in the workplace, people analytics is advancing in a similar way. The importance of people analytics in the modern workplace cannot be understated – it is being used by companies of all sizes to inform all sorts of business initiatives. For recruiters and hiring managers, the role of people analytics is to find talent through a grid of data. Global businesses, like Unilever, are using analytics and algorithms to find new candidates and target potential employees through their smartphones. It’s certain that more businesses will pick up the pace and include algorithms in their hiring and selection procedures in the future.

Hiring

People analytics helps recruiters pick the right fit for their companies. It is one of those reasons why hiring managers take it more seriously these days. From the analytics, they can analyze and decide on what candidate fits a role perfectly.

Compensation

Another importance of people analytics is how it makes structuring compensation plans easy. From the data provided by the analytics, companies can properly compensate employees based on skills, experience, and other relevant factors.

Lower Turnover Rates

One of the importance of people analytics lies in its ability to reduce turnover rate. Companies that use this approach tend to have higher retention rates. The system allows HR management teams to figure out employees who are on the verge of quitting their jobs. The data presents reasons why such employees feel that way. This will help HR teams to organize a plan to sort the problem and retain their employees.

Increased Productivity

It helps human resource teams to organize the right training and development programs that will aid in the growth of employees. This in turn leads to improved productivity.

Organizations should take this into account when deciding which people analytics capabilities are most crucial for their HR departments and for the needs of employees. Technology broadens the range of possibilities, and so does the variety of analytical abilities required to be successful in many different roles.

An overview of people analytics tools

According to a Deloitte survey, 91% of companies manage, track, and evaluate KPIs like employee engagement, cost per hire, turnover rates, gender pay equity, and more using outdated tools like spreadsheets. Fortunately, there are people analytics tools available to make tracking and analyzing this data easier so you don’t have to deal with multiple spreadsheets and/or Excel formulas.

The HR Digest has created a brief guide to help you in making sense of the latest people analytics tools available for companies.

• Lattice
• intelliHR
• Qualtrics People Analytics
• SageHR
• IBM Workforce Planning
• Visier People
• Leapsome
• Engagedly
• BambooHR
• Tableau

Using people analytics, companies can now make decisions that are supported by data. Companies can estimate the likelihood that an employee, team or the entire organization will meet a performance goal. The most successful companies, of course, will employ people analytics to supplement their own recruitment criteria and create happier, healthier, and more effective workplaces.

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