Companies are realizing the importance of data-driven decision-making in today's fast-changing business environment. Workforce analytics is one such area of strategic importance. It is a game-changer in digital transformation and human resource optimization, delivering deep insights into employee performance, engagement, and organizational effectiveness.
Workforce analytics tools help companies make data-driven choices, boost productivity, develop talent, and build a robust and future-ready workforce by unlocking the possibilities in HR data. Explore workforce analytics, where data meets human potential, and company growth and success are endless.
Workforce analytics is defined as the use of tools and methodologies to measure the behaviors and performance of your employees, along with your employee processes. It helps optimize an organization's human resource management and presents employee data on performance, engagement, morale, productivity, etc.
Workforce analytics provides valuable, decision-making, and productive information for a company. To achieve business goals, HR professionals and business leaders must strap up technology and business insights in which HR analytics plays a vital role. This data analysis tool gives you business performance and improvement reports and analyzes staffing, recruitment, training, development, and other benefits of workforce analytics.
HR Analytics does not require expensive software, workforce analytics tools, large teams, or lengthy processes. You can start small - have conversations with employees and record their responses. The next step would be to add managers in the loop, involve various functions as necessary, make a plan, and commit to it. Sharing the data is crucial, but you need to do it with suitable and relevant managers and HR professionals.
HR Analytics will help you monitor and improve employee engagement, retention, wellness, productivity, experience, and work culture. Tools provide options where you can give access to a select few people or limit what other managers see. Employee data is confidential and sensitive and needs to be handled as such. Use the data to drive initiatives, remedy existing problems, and bring positive organizational changes.
Every company looks for cost savings and productivity gains, but how can they achieve within the budget? Here is the solution where they have to perform and look into it. HR analytics can evaluate employee performance, productivity, cost, overtime, etc. It's a business tool without human input.
Workforce analytics is presented in other forms, including predictive and prescriptive analytics, which help give detailed information about the workforce.
01. Predictive Workforce Analytics
With this data, the company focuses on future operations, like which workers have the highest potential of success within the organization and which weren’t. The predictive workforce analytics data also gives you information about employees likely to leave the organization.
02. Prescriptive Workforce Analytics
This workforce analytics data provides a plan for a company that helps to develop and retain key workers of the workforce, which are uncovered from the predictive analytics.
QuestionPro Workforce is an exceptional workforce analytics software that enables businesses to realize the full potential of their employees, and Analytics XO is your one-stop shop for understanding what your employees are experiencing at the workplace and, most importantly, how these experiences affect the employees.
With Analytics XO, you can now gauge overall employee Net Promoter Score, employee engagement, employee retention, and willingness to put in efforts to improve themselves at work. The most effective workforce analytics discuss "what" and "why."
It is more than numbers on a page. It’s your culture, your organization, and its people!
Here is how your dashboard looks once you receive your data from the employee surveys you deployed.
According to Gartner, Workstream collaboration tools manage, coordinate, and execute teamwork and cross-collaboration initiatives. These conversation-centric tools foster collaboration and project efficiency. Organizations that utilize workstream collaboration record 21% more productivity and higher business success.
With a geographically and demographically diverse workforce now being the new normal, it has opened the workforce to many changes. We see a lot more adoption for cloud-based applications and various other tools. Workstream collaboration platforms are now commonplace, either introduced by team managers or the IT team.
Because employees have diverse understandings, demands, and comfort levels, usage and acceptance are the biggest challenges. It's hard to get employees to agree on collaboration apps. However, employers must realize that apps boost the performance and output of employees.
According to a blog on ItsWorthMore, 3 out of 4 American workers use company-mandated chat software at work, and 33% confessed they were distracted by its notifications.
Collaboration and technology can also reduce productivity and increase inefficiencies and errors. So, how can we comprehend, monitor, and assess production and efficiency?
Workplace analytics is the answer. It can help monitor each employee, understand their strengths and weaknesses and help improve your organization’s human capital management.
The business landscape today is more dynamic and competitive than ever before. New sorts of analysis that were previously impractical for businesses became possible with data and data collection growth. As a result, many companies are deciding to implement workforce analytics to meet their strategic goals.
Research shows those data-driven decision-making organizations are more efficient and beneficial than their competitors, who do not use data.
Workforce Analytics helps your organization become more strategic; workforce data enables you to tackle current issues and plan better for future activities. Let's look at some of the benefits of Workforce Analytics:
01. Improve your hiring process
Talent acquisition is a critical element of your HR process, an all-year-round activity. Whether hiring for a new function, a larger team, or a new role, your talent acquisition team is always busy. Finding the right candidate is still a task; when they do, one can only hope everything goes well, and they join the organization.
How many candidates join, and how many drop-offs at what stage? What job boards work the most for you? How many candidates do you need to reach out to close a position? These are just some questions you could resolve through workforce analytics. This data will help you see the bigger picture and fill in the gaps causing delays.
02. Reduce attrition
Employee retention is becoming more challenging day by day, especially with the younger workforce not afraid to switch jobs frequently. Workforce Analytics here will go a long way in identifying the factors contributing to attrition and what remedial measures can be taken to avoid it in the future.
Conduct exit interviews, gather data, look at the reasons and patterns, and find a way to arrest employee churn.
03. Improve employee experience
Managers and HR representatives must meet with employees regularly to understand what factors affect employee experiences positively and negatively. This is a crucial step in improving the employee experience.
Many organizations fail to realize that employee experience starts with hiring. Before recruitment, your first interaction with a candidate is crucial to any other HR-related process. EX is the summation of your employee's experiences on their journey. Every behavior, step, and experience counts.
04. Make your workforce productive
Productivity levels will always go up and down, affecting many factors. This ranges from office infrastructure, work environment, managers and team-mates, and job satisfaction, among other things.
Gathering data on what’s affecting productivity will certainly arm you with data to take corrective actions. Engagement is a significant aspect affecting workforce productivity; look at improving it. You can start by implementing a few employee engagement ideas and activities to boost the rate and build on that further.
05. Improve your talent management
Talent management is not only about pre-hiring, hiring, or annual performance reviews but is also much more than that. While each organization is unique, some processes should be standard; these could be regular one-on-ones, skip-level meetings, etc. You need to consider training, recreational activities, and counseling, among others.
HR should continuously monitor their talent processes, identify challenges and bottlenecks, and work on them. Meeting with employees is ideal; however, we understand this may not always be possible or feasible.
Conducting employee surveys is a good idea; get their feedback and inputs, work on them, and let them know they are heard. Employee surveys don’t always have to be exit surveys, do it to see what they feel about employee benefits, how employee experience is at your organization, what changes they would like to see for improving it, etc.
06. Gain employee trust
Thanks to Workforce Analytics, you can access data that lets you see what's happening in the organization and how employees perceive it. When you are armed with data, it enables you to fix what's supposedly broken and improve future processes.
You can see what's working and what's not. When you change procedures to make them better and introduce new ones, your employees take notice. They know their feedback is valued, and the workforce management team will act on it. This is crucial to building and maintaining employee trust, a critical element to high employee engagement, success, and retention percentages.
Many enterprises across all industries are utilizing modern workforce analytics. Here are a few workforce analytics trends we see getting big in 2023.
01. Real-time analytics
Organizations have heavily relied on old HR analytics, gathered only once or twice by systems through yearly or half-yearly reviews. The trend is now changing, as are the processes and various data and statistical models. Organizations are looking for information as and when things happen, not after the fact. Systems and methods will now look to have real-time data access to take action at the right time.
02. It’s not one-time
Workforce Analytics is not just a one-off project. Most of these projects start as a one-time consultation. However, only with a few reports and analytics you can't fathom how your workforce is feeling.
Don’t get me wrong, a one-time effort is excellent, but have you ever thought it might be better to develop ways to gather more frequent employee feedback? Survey practice is changing, and so should your approach toward HR analytics.
The more common methods used by organizations are as follows:
- Traditional surveys are being replaced by frequently used 360-degree feedback surveys and bi-annual employee performance surveys.
- Weekly, monthly, or quarterly pulse review surveys to gather frequent and more feedback.
- Monitoring continuous real-time employee morale and organizational mood.
03. Transparency is key
The overview of workforce data collection cannot be complete without mentioning federal regulations like GDPR. Here transparency is the key.
GDPR is fuelling many positive developments about what kind of data needs to be collected, how to judiciously use this data, and how algorithms and workforce analytics are used to make decisions for your workforce.
Again all that glitters is not gold; there is a downside to GDPR. It has created a lot of uncertainty about what kind of data processing is acceptable. Employees can ask companies to erase their data, and they have to comply with it. The maximum fines imposed on being unable to follow the process induce restraints to take the next step forward regarding workforce analytics.
04. Focus on employee productivity
Most of the traditional problems in an organization are solved by recruiting new people. However, most organizations forget this leads to several issues. First, you are losing your well-experienced employees; second, your modern workforce is yet to adjust to the organization's culture and working process.
These new people will take a while to come to speed. Here you hamper overall productivity. Using people data, you can pinpoint the characteristics of top-performing employees and the conditions that facilitate top workforce performance. These findings can primarily be used to improve productivity and hire new candidates with similar characteristics.
05. Workforce Analytics should be employee-centric
A severe lack of trust can affect workforce analytics in many organizations. How do you rise above this? Stop asking what is in it for me. Instead, start making it more employee-centric. Focus your concentration on how my employees will benefit from our collected data.
Your workforce analytics dashboard should reflect meaningful data to help you make excellent decisions for your workforce. Remember, employees are your assets; treat them likewise.
06. Change your approach
The usual tendency is a top-down approach; most traditional organizations believe this is the correct and most common approach. HR finds it difficult to approach issues differently. Performance management is an excellent example. Changing the performance management process is considered a challenge throughout the organization.
Employees are now playing a more active role and taking the initiative to register their timely feedback, whether about organizational culture, managers, or overall workplace concerns. If you, as an organization, can gather appropriate data and make use of workforce analytics, your employees will benefit from the changed approach.
Final Words
Workforce analytics measures and improves workforce performance using advanced data analysis tools and metrics. This makes it easier to prove ROI on human capital management (HCM) initiatives like hiring and employee planning. HR departments can provide executives with new information using such next-gen functionalities.
Workforce analytics helps business leaders to have a better understanding of their employees and identify opportunities for improvement. Workforce analysis can assist you in establishing the ideal number of employees for your business so that you can conduct smooth work planning operations.
Make smarter workforce decisions by measuring people's behavior using workforce analytics.
Survey Software
Easy to use and accessible for everyone. Design, send and analyze online surveys.
Research Suite
A suite of enterprise-grade research tools for market research professionals.
CX
Experiences change the world. Deliver the best with our CX management software.
Workforce
Create the best employee experience and act on real-time data from end to end.
