4 ways people data can drive a great workplace culture
In today’s climate, people data is a major priority for HR professionals to aid future decision making and drive meaningful initiatives in the workplace, in line with what matters most to employees.
Traditionally, HR has been very ‘people’ focused, serving the humans within the organisation and dealing with employee matters head-on. And in this past year, we’ve seen just how much HR are worth their weight in gold when it comes to sustaining the welfare of both its people and the wider business.
Whilst you don’t have to be a numbers guru to extract useful information from HR reports, there’s a particular skill and confidence involved in handling people data and analytics regularly. If you already have this in abundance, you’ll likely know the breadth of benefits that leveraging this data can offer.
However, if you’re still mastering the art of HR data and analytics, we highlight the value of embracing technology and 4 benefits of using people data to drive both business performance and positive workplace culture.
1. It validates your ‘instincts’ about workplace culture
There’s plenty of research proving the link between workplace culture and productivity and their impact on business performance. For example, a study done by Glassdoor found that organisations with a positive work culture outperformed significantly in the market compared to those where employee satisfaction was low. But how does that relate to your organisation specifically?
It doesn’t matter how many studies you find to help prove that the ideas you have based on ‘instinct’ are good ones; senior stakeholders will want to know the value in the context of your business. People data can help you to tell a story that ultimately leads to the same conclusion you ‘instinctively’ knew to be true because of your experience and perception of what employees need to thrive. Data that you can deliver in an evidence-based way to help you make progress with your HR initiatives and improve workplace culture.
2. It enables future planning and innovation
Trying to implement a new innovative approach or get buy-in from senior stakeholders on human-driven initiatives can be difficult. By ‘human-driven’ we mean initiatives that are created with employees in mind to make them happier or improve their experience at work, including:
- Wellbeing breaks or mindfulness workshops
- Free team lunches or new employee perks
- Team building activities or retreats
- Fundraising and charitable events
- Break out spaces and onsite games
While pitching these ideas may have been an uphill struggle in the past, with the right technology in place you can produce meaningful people data to back them up. If you’re using a good HR system that can produce insights that create compelling reports, you can use these reports to prove the validity of your strategies to help drive business performance. This way, you’ll not only get sign off faster buy you’ll also be able to make a bigger impact on business performance and produce results that you can report on in your next board meeting. It’s a win-win.
3. It improves workplace culture and productivity intuitively
Making employees happy has always been important to HR who put people first, but it’s also important to the organisation. We know that a happier workforce is more engaged and productive, which as a consequence improves business performance.
Traditionally, you may have tackled challenges like employee engagement, morale and wellbeing counter-intuitively to fix the problem; offering blanket employee motivation schemes or company perks. However, as organisations go through digital transformation, they are becoming more astute at gathering and leveraging people data. Even if you get the funding and go-ahead to implement new initiatives across the business, making assumptions about what will make employees happier isn’t necessarily going to hit the mark. Access to real-time people data will enable you to review, reflect and respond on the findings, so you can implement initiatives that present a real solution for employees.
4. Employees feel listened too and become more engaged
If you are doing all of the above, then you are also serving your employees effectively; acting on what doesn’t work and implementing new strategies that make their jobs easier or improve workplace culture. That’s why one consequence of using people data effectively is that employees are more likely to be happier and more engaged with the business in the process.
Of course, it’s not just about them, what about you? You’re an employee too! Excess admin can still pose a signification problem for HR teams and so to get accurate people data you also need a connected working solution that brings together business-wide systems. Implement this successfully and user adoption of self-serve HR systems is also likely to go up. This means employees can spend less time frustrated trying to remember excessive login details and more time doing their job. You also have more time to focus on forecasting and driving forward wider value-added HR initiatives.
Powering up your people data to improve business performance
With HR becoming more aware of the importance of people data, all that remains is the need to improve data quality; because the actions taken on the back of people data are only as good as the data in place. Without connected working and quality data centres, these benefits are pretty much void.
To power up your people data, discover how our HR software solutions could help you by getting in touch with our friendly industry experts.
Plus, for more insights on how to build a positive workplace culture as part of the employee experience, download your free HR guide.
