HR Analytics in a Technology-Driven World

But what are HR analytics?

Finance, Sales, Marketing… the analysis of their data is obviously a little bit important to the functioning of a business such as risual. Accurate, reliable data and its analysis provides solid evidence from which organisations can develop important plans and strategies.

Well, they of course relate to the ‘people’ data. This can be anything from turnover rates, absence records, employee skills (SFIA!!), recruitment lead times… the list goes on! Being able to objectively collate this data is pretty important to workforce planning and keeping the business functioning. Not only this, but this data can be exploited to drive some considerable decisions from the top of the company.

Unfortunately, things aren’t quite that simple in the HR world. Employees are clearly pretty important, but rather annoyingly, HR data might be just one of the most difficult types of business data to analyse. As well as numerical data, staff show different qualitative behaviours which aren’t quite as simple as being put into numbers on an Excel spreadsheet!

But, as the world advances, new ways to analyse and use HR data are being created. An example of this is the rapid improvement of tech in facilitating performance tracking – from departments to teams to even specific members of staff. If a sales cold-caller isn’t hitting their target of 100 calls a day, technology can now allow us to see how many calls are made, their length, and how many actually resulted in sales. It can even show what part of the day the employee is most productive – why is he/she not making any sales between 8-10am? Are they demotivated? Are they still asleep? Any data gives us a good starting point in figuring out a way to improve their performance. If motivation is the issue, enhanced employee engagement might be the answer – something we might not have realised before these advances!

Some larger organisations are already utilising their HR data to recruit. No business likes losing an employee – not only do you lose the employee’s skills, but you often must invest time and money in finding someone to take their place. Rank Group (Mecca Bingo’s owners) use predictive people analytics to determine how likely their staff are to remain with the company. Put simply, they put performance data together with technological psychological assessments and feedback from employees, which allows them to identify the top performers that are most likely to leave. This gives them the opportunity to reach out to these employees and see how they can stop them from running off!

All this seems great and yet, Experian’s research found 50% of employers said they weren’t able to use HR data to drive decision-making, while 40% are still making HR decisions based on their instinct alone!? We already have Dynamics 365 for Talent, where we’re learning probably every single day a different way in which we can store and use employee data to our advantage – as it develops and improves, one day we will discover the best way of exploiting it!

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