According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report, 85% of talent professionals agree that People Analytics is very important to the future of recruiting and HR. Not surprisingly, there has been a 242% increase in HR professionals with data analysis skills over the last five years. Since the launch of Google Analytics (soon to become Google Analytics 4) on November the 14th in 2005, analytics and data have steadily worked their way into nearly every business sector imaginable, revolutionizing the way we all work, and HR is no exception.
Investing in people analytics is directly linked to gaining a clear commercial competitive advantage and ROI for organizations. Deloitte report shows that businesses with well-developed people analytics capability demonstrated a clear link between talent and leadership pipelines, reduction in costs and gains in efficiency at all stages of the recruitment and selection process.
People analytics to retain the talent pool amidst the ”’Great Resignation
With the two-year mark of the pandemic behind us, there is an increase in discussions around emerging workforce needs and prevalent behaviors like the ”’Great Resignation’. As organizations and HR leaders scramble to fill in the talent gaps amidst such flux of employee expectations and changing work environment people analytics can play a key role by separating the signal from the noise.
It helps business and HR leaders understand the root cause of the issues like attrition by supporting it with data. It helps narrow down where and why people are leaving, enabling a more targeted solution. People analytics can exactly pinpoint which set of employees are leaving, across what functions or job families or location, or demographic, etc., hence enabling a more exact solution.
The Great Resignation data in the US shares a specific tilt towards women and people nearing retirement who are quitting workforce early. Predictive analysis, using employee engagement scores, and turnover benchmarks can further help predict when the employees are leaving to allow for more proactive talent management. People analytics, when used right, has been shown to improve attrition rates by 50%.
Managing recruitment and workforce plan in a Digital First’ world
Organizations are increasingly relying on digital recruitment channels, and this coupled with the shift to a digital-first way of working, the importance of people analytics to the future of recruitment is unquestionable. When done right, people analytics lead to an 80% increase in recruitment efficiency.
People analytics and HR teams should be joining discussions with business teams to ask questions like what % of our workforce is not currently working due to COVID-19? And what % of our workforce can work remotely?
Case in Point: National Australia Bank, which built a people analytics to support its executives, managers, and colleagues during the current pandemic. It built a thriving community of 800+ data and people analytics professionals across the company to support collaboration, learning and career development.
Future recruiting needs workforce planning, identifying the skills and capabilities of the future, modeling and predicting key talent gaps in the organizations, and alerting the business to allow planning for the same are all business-critical areas where people analytics is finding increasing relevance.
Other areas in which people analytics can enable organizations to assess and optimize include:
- Process effectiveness and efficiency assessing and tracking parameters like source of hire, application completion rate, submittal to interview ratio, interview to offer rate, offer acceptance and decline rates, new hire turnover, and time to fill post
- Recruiting cost cost to recruit someone, cost of exiting, time taken to onboard and work effectively
- Recruiting impact on diversity knowing demographics and tracking how recruiting effects organizations’ overall diversity and inclusion by category, location, and roles
Hiring the right candidate in an increasingly complex business and work environment
Finding the right candidate, and hiring remote workers is now drastically different than it was two years ago. The talent requirements, both functional and behavioral, have become increasingly complex especially with the emergence of new roles and digital skill requirements in organizations. As a result, employers need to invest more in detailing the job requirements and assessing the best fit candidate for the role. A combination of analytics and competency mapping tools increasingly allows employers to assess the candidate’s past performance, personality, and overall fitment and predict how they would respond in specific situations and in the role itself.
Coupled with conscious efforts to sniff out and eliminate bias in the process, this can also lead to more diverse workforces as decisions are based on more than gut feelings and perceptions.
Getting the employee engagement right and ”’listening’ to the remote employee
Employee experience has traditionally been evaluated via annual surveys focused on job satisfaction or employee engagement. Recently, there has been an increasing trend of using more regular ”’pulse surveys’ and a host of ”’employee listening tools’ . Such tools for employee listening have gained even more popularity during the COVID times. Companies such as Rabobank, Merck, and National Australia Bank are all using employee listening to understand how their employees are coping with new remote working arrangements. It provides valuable insights into understanding how employee needs for support are changing, and what their preferences are for returning to work.
Organizations are using techniques such as stratified sampling and text analytics on free text comments (software that decodes words and word frequency into emotional sentiment or different psychological traits) and discussion boards to gain valuable insights into what’s important to their employees in a rapidly changing environment. These tools also help avoid any survey fatigue and preserve anonymity at an individual level.
Studies highlight that when done right, people analytics can lead to a 25% rise in business productivity by engaging the employees.
Supporting productivity and remote collaboration
With the advent of COVID and the dramatic changes in the ways of working across the world, employees are now using an increasing amount of collaboration and workload management tools like Zoom, MS Teams, Google Docs, Slack, etc. These digital tools allow organizations to get rich data regarding employee performance and productivity, and challenge and support relevant talent decisions accordingly.
Who should start investing in people analytics?
Large technology giants like Google and Microsoft are significantly investing in HR digital transformation and people analytics agenda. They are increasingly hiring people with advanced skill sets and doctorates in areas like industrial and organizational psychology. They are further building on their talent management systems by deploying smart technologies around AI and Big Data.
While the correlation between investing in people analytics, employee engagement, business productivity, and building remote workforce is becoming clearer to organizations, studies report that about 60% of the companies are still stuck at the first level of the workplace maturity model being operational reporting. With such opportunities to leverage analytics tools existing today, CHROs and business executives need to carefully assess their business and workforce needs, and current organization maturity level to determine the best path and pace to be able to benefit from People Analytics.
