5 ways HR Managers can leverage data for increased business value
For HR, the struggle is in mining the right data. By the year 2020, 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created for each person on the planet every single second. To stay competitive and move your organization forward, you’ll need the tools to identify and utilize your most important data.
However, it’s no good having and analyzing valuable employee data if it isn’t used to drive future success. Here are a few of the most important ways that you can leverage your data for the benefit of your business.
1. Discover and improve engagement drivers
Employee engagement is the holy grail of people management for several reasons. It helps with staff retention, improves company morale, makes employees more productive – and can lead to greater profitability for your business.
The data you get from surveys and questionnaires are a great indicator of what drives employees, paving the way for HR to adopt strategies that can further create engagement.
2. Put the power in employees’ hands
Workforce management tools now offer real-time mobile access for employees that can help to boost morale in several ways. Payroll and time management can be automated, leading to fewer errors in pay and benefits.
Workers can also access their development and goal management plans, get 360 feedback from their working circles, and access performance reviews or surveys. This all helps the employee experience. It also makes it easy for employees and managers to access employee performance data and break it down into relevant charts or accessible information.
Plus, workforce management tools benefit an organization by cutting admin costs. They also give HR leaders the capability to access invaluable real-time data, compare individual and team performance against a budget, calculate ROI, and measure how successful the implementation of a plan has been in real terms.
3. Identify and cultivate future leaders
The data from people management offers plenty of insights about your talent pool, but it needs to be tempered with traditional HR insights. HR can now implement business strategies based on statistical evidence and data insights. This is vital when future planning or cultivating talent management strategies. Succession planning should be every organization’s number one priority, according to Forbes, but it found that only 14 percent of directors had a detailed succession plan in place.
Established KPIs should be used to judge the productivity of your employees and identify potential leaders in your workforce. People analytics can also be used to improve your recruitment processes and qualify successful hires or identify hires who are retention risks.
You can also carry out assessments, surveys, tests, and performance reviews to further judge candidates’ suitability. Real-time analytics makes it easier to track progress and identify any areas where further training is required and to work together on ongoing, data-driven development plans.
4. Have the right people in the right place
Predictive data analytics now allows employers to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Demand-based rostering makes it easy to calculate how many workers they’ll need based on data analysis of staff competencies, historical trends, seasonal factors, and past customer behavior.
Not only does this avoid costly over-staffing on any given day but it also ensures that retail businesses or service providers won’t lose any business due to under-staffing. This form of data analytics keeps costs down and maximizes profits by using forecasting models to predict outcomes.
Demand-based rostering can also cut out just-in-time scheduling of workers, which can leave businesses open to working shift breaches and compliance issues. One major retailer cut overtime bills by 92 percent with CoreHR software. The accuracy of this system allows organizations to properly plan budgets and accurately access wage and project costs.
5. Leverage external data
It’s no longer enough to look inward for your HR answers, especially when it comes to recruitment. There’s a growing trend in HR of harnessing and integrating external data from social media and other public platforms. This can help to attract star performers with outreach efforts and improve the standard of your hires.
“Today’s forward-thinking HR organizations are well aware of the treasure trove of data available through outside sources – such as social networks – that can help monitor and build employment brand, identify and recruit talent, better understand compensation strategies, recognize flight risk, and monitor employee satisfaction and engagement,” according to a recent Deloitte report.
HR technologies are now moving towards predictive algorithms and technologies, with cognitive technologies such as AI and self-learning technologies forming the next wave of analytics tools. This type of analytics represents the future of talent acquisition (TA).
“Predictive analytics is increasingly important to TA, as sophisticated analytics teams begin to prioritize recruiting workflows, conduct workforce planning, evaluate different recruiting sources, assess the quality of hire, and use pre-hire assessments,” says the latest Deloitte Human Capital Trends report, which adds, “companies that are not prioritizing analytics do so at their own risk.”
Knowing how to leverage the relevant data is vital, but preparing for the future is just as important. Constantly updating your systems and staying ahead of the trends will allow you to keep accessing invaluable data that can be leveraged for organizational success.
Falling behind in this competitive world of analytics is like trying to pan gold with your bare hands. Without the right tools, you’re going to struggle to add value to your business.
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