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HR Data Analytics: The Power of Data in your HR Strategy
Human Resources has a rich source of data at its fingertips. From the basic employee database to performance metrics and sentiment analysis, HR has a treasure trove of data that can be harnessed, processed, and analyzed. That said, HR has the potential to be one of the most data-driven departments in any organization.
Pardon the geekiness, but HR is such an exciting field to incorporate analytics into strategy and initiatives! Still, we’ve heard from many HR leaders that are frustrated with the lack of objective data about their company and its employees to build an effective analytics strategy. After all, you probably have access to a lot of raw data about your company, but that information isn’t necessarily organized or easily accessible.
HR analytics refers to using data and statistical analysis to generate insights that drive business strategy. By adopting an HR analytics approach, you can find actionable insights within your existing data sets, conduct analyses on smaller segments of your employee population to identify problems, and use this information to inform future decisions and actions.
Why Your Company Should Care About HR Analytics
HR analytics can help you better understand your employees, your business, and improve the employee experience. You might think that you already know everything there is to know about your company’s employees — but you’d be surprised by how much you could be missing. It’s important to regularly evaluate exactly how your employees feel about the company, their job, and their colleagues because sentiments are constantly changing. If you want to improve your company culture and retain top talent, you need to know what your employees want and need, what irks them, what motivates them, and when!
Analytics can help you identify areas of improvement so you can focus on fixing what matters most to your employees and best support your people. Analytics can also help you identify ways to improve your company’s bottom line by increasing productivity, reducing turnover, and making smarter hiring decisions.
HR has the potential to be one of the most data-driven departments in any organization.
What HR Data and AI Can Teach You
If you are just getting started with analytics for HR, it can be overwhelming to wade through your organization’s existing data sources and figure out what to analyze. There are plenty of metrics you could be collecting, but it’s hard to know which ones to use in your analytics strategy. Analytics relies on data, but artificial intelligence (AI) can help you find the right data to inform your organization’s HR strategy. AI can help you collect the data you need, organize it, and give you insight into what your employees are experiencing. AI can help you analyze language, sentiment, and other soft metrics that aren’t easily captured in a database. AI can also help you collect data from different sources and consolidate it all in one place so you can analyze it. You don’t have to worry about collecting data from multiple HR systems and Excel spreadsheets — AI can help you pull all of that information together.
Selecting the Right Metrics in HR
But before you can use HR data to influence your company’s strategy, you need to know what data to capture and how to organize it. One of the first steps in an analytics strategy is to determine which metrics are essential to your business and how you can capture them. The metrics you use will depend on your business objectives. You should consider which metrics reflect your company’s core business goals and how they can be applied to your employees. By selecting the right metrics, you can track how well your company is doing and identify areas for improvement.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is a good indicator of how happy and productive your employees are. It measures how committed employees are to their work and their company. When employee engagement is low, it’s often a symptom of larger issues within the workplace.
Learn how Erudit measures your daily engagement levels, without the surveys.
Employee Retention
Employee retention is the percentage of employees who remain with your company for a certain period of time. This metric can help you understand how satisfied your employees are with their jobs and how likely they are to stay with your company.
Employee Productivity
Employee productivity is the amount of work your employees are able to complete in a certain period of time, such as the number of hours they are able to work each week. Productivity can be measured in various ways, including the number of hours employees work, how many tasks they complete each hour, or their daily productivity.
Hiring Success
Measuring hiring success can help you track how well your company is interviewing, hiring, and onboarding new employees. Metrics related to hiring success include the number of hires, how many candidates drop out of the hiring process, and the average time it takes to fill a position.
Burnout Risk
There was an alarming increase in the cases of work burnout during the pandemic, as organizations transitioned to remote working. The best cure for burnout, which happens when stressors overwhelm employees, is prevention.
Learn how you can track the risk of burnout with Erudit.
How to Start Using Data Analytics in HR
Start by tracking the data that is easy to collect and relevant to your business.
Now that you know what data is available and how you can use it to inform your strategy, it’s time to get started on your HR analytics initiative. You don’t need to wait for the perfect time or gather all the data you need. You can get started with a few small projects and build momentum for additional analytics initiatives. Before you dive in, though, you need to get the right data into the right systems so it’s easily accessible. You can’t start your analytics initiative if you don’t know where your data is or how to access it. Start by tracking the data that is easy to collect and relevant to your business.
How HR Data Can Help Build a Diverse Workplace
HR analytics can help you understand what’s happening within your organization, but you can use data to go further — like understanding the makeup of your employees and conducting hiring analyses to improve your diversity. By understanding the composition of your current employees, you can identify potential areas of improvement and make data-driven hiring decisions.
Gender and Ethnicity
Gender and ethnicity are two important factors that can help you identify any potential gaps in your employee base. Use gender and ethnicity data to identify whether your company’s workforce composition matches national averages. If there are any major differences, you can investigate why those gaps exist.
Education and Experience
Education and experience levels can provide insights into how your employees found their jobs. You can use this data to identify ways to attract more qualified candidates. You can also identify where your company may have gaps, which can help you prioritize your hiring efforts.
Examples of How to Use Data Analytics in Human Resources
As you’ve seen, there are many ways data can be applied to HR initiatives. Whether you’re looking to improve employee engagement, hiring practices, or productivity, data can provide insight. Here are some examples of how you can use data to improve your HR strategy:
Improve employee engagement
Engagement levels across departments or regions may vary, which could indicate problems. You can identify ways to improve engagement at the department level. At the company level, you can use engagement to find out what factors drive job satisfaction.
Improve hiring practices
You can use data to help you hire the best candidates. One way to do this is to use an AI tool to help you conduct structured interviews. You can also use data to identify how long it takes you to fill a position. In addition, you can use data to understand which source (recruitment, referral bonus, etc.) is giving you the best return on investment.
Improve employee productivity
Use data to understand what tasks each employee works on and how long it takes to complete those tasks. You can use this information to help your employees work more efficiently. You can also use productivity data to help you better understand customer demand.
Conclusion
HR analytics can provide an in-depth look at your organization and its employees. You can use data to understand your employees’ engagement, hiring practices, and productivity, as well as how to improve diversity, inclusion, and overall wellbeing of your workplace. HR analytics is an exciting way to leverage the data you already have to make smarter business decisions. However, you must first determine what data you should be collecting, organizing, and analyzing. Once you know what data to gather, you can start analyzing it to discover insights that can help improve your company.
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