Posted on 30th Aug, 2021
People analytics is a critical component to improving the full employee life cycle, but most businesses – especially small and medium businesses – do not use this to its full advantage.
People analytics have begun gaining traction in the global HR sphere in the recent years, to better understand and manage organizations' workforce. Employees can be both a company's greatest asset as well as, often, their largest expense. This further leads to the facts that when supported well, employee performance and productivity can enhance a company's sustainable competitive advantage, but when mismanaged or ill-equipped to meet organizational needs, the same workforce can be a drain on already scarce resources.
People analytics is all about leveraging the juggernaut of recent digital innovations to obtain statistical insights from employee data and using this data to model and optimise the organisational human capital. Such analytics allow decision makers to make decisions based on solid, irrefutable evidence, which facilitates the development of greater transparency, fairness, efficiency, and productivity in the company, while permitting the expansion of workers' opportunities for personal and professional growth.
Innovative people analytics can empower HR managers to use employee related big data to arrive at decisions, and to achieve operational excellence among numerous HR functions, and to improve the entire employee lifecycle, resulting in happier, healthier, and more productive employees.
Key HR areas in which people analytics can be applied:
Talent Acquisition is a function that involves high volumes of activity, with inputs, outputs, and processes which may sometimes be difficult to detail, and thus even more difficult to manage or control. People analytics can be of significant important here, with the capacity to offer insights into what makes an ‘ideal' employee. By assimilating predictive analytics within existing recruitment processes, analytic algorithms trained using historical data can help facilitate ‘best-fit' recommendations to hiring managers. Furthermore, people analytics can assist companies in decisions about the candidate characteristics to favour in the talent acquisition process for specific roles, in determining the appropriate volume of resources to be deployed for each candidate, and, in optimising the entire hiring process.
Hiring and Onboarding when effectively managed, can help boost organizational productivity, by facilitating a faster learning curve for employees. With onboarding beginning prior to joining, tools such as pre-employment assessments help gain an understanding of employee strengths and weaknesses, so that actions can be taken well in advance to support employee development. It is here that people analytics can make some of its best contributions – by helping create tailored onboarding processes, designed to meet the needs of each new hire.
Learning and Development is undoubtedly among the strongest beneficiaries of the advances in people analytics, with big data helping organisations deepen their understanding of the workforce. Furthermore, people analytics also possesses the capacity to match the capability requirements of the organisation with the learning needs of individual employees, also allowing for the assessment of soft skills, emotional intelligence, and underlying attitudes which can then be addressed.
Engagement and Motivation surprisingly – considering how each employee experiencing a unique meaning and purpose in their work – is an aspect which can benefit significantly from integration with analytics. Predictive people analytics tools can not only help measure individual employee experiences in real-time, but also identify drivers of employee engagement and productivity in the first place, so that practices may be adapted to enhance them.