Written by Varshith Mittapalli 23 November 2022 | 4 min readExplores how people analytics can impact work culture, enhance employee engagement and productivity, and facilitate data-driven decision-making in organizations.
It is no secret that the concept of business has evolved exponentially. It is a complex setup held together by a multifaceted structure with each function designed to satisfy a purpose. In the past few decades, Human Resources (HR) has emerged as an important facet of organizational growth and daily activities. It is responsible for hiring and maintaining the entire workforce and contributes to strategic decisions in the organization.
With the increasing dependence on technology for operations, many HR managers in different organizations have increased their dependence on numbers, to help them make decisions for the entire workplace. How, you ask? The boon of our dependence on technology has led to generating lots of user data, which can be used to make informed decisions about various operations and reduce uncertainty.
HRM is crucial. It is one of the few wings that is connected to every department in the organization. In order to manage such a diverse workforce, it is important to stay updated on all fronts. This would include keeping track of current employee well-being, logistical and staff requirements, inculcating values of an efficient workforce, hiring the right talent for the right roles, and working on employee motivation and retention. This is where data plays a vital role.
Big data allows us to perform analytics to ask meaningful questions about our data. Theoretically, there are 3 broad categories of analytics:
Descriptive Analytics: The scope of analytics is boundless. Once we set KPIs for evaluating different functions, we can create an interactive dashboard for data aggregation and warehousing and measure performance.
Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics is useful, especially in reducing attrition rates and effective hiring operations. The cost of hiring a new employee is a lot more than employee retention. Predictive analytics helps us understand the scope of a candidate’s tenure in our organization. This determines their eventual compatibility with the organization and reduces unsuccessful hiring.
Prescriptive Analytics: Prescriptive Analytics understands the insights gained from descriptive and predictive analytics and creates a strategy to tackle the issues that were inferred. For example, by looking at attrition rates and an average tenure of an employee in the organization, prescriptive analytics can help create an effective employee engagement and retention strategy.
From an HR perspective, these theoretical aspects come together to create a concept called People Analytics, an emerging application of analytics and a byproduct of the relationship between HR, data, and technology.
In simple terms, people analytics can be defined as creating and upholding higher standards of human resource management with the help of data analytics. It assesses, predicts, and makes strategic decisions with the data generated in the workplace.
People analytics starts with setting the right objectives. There must be clarity about the goals of the operations and how it can impact the organization. Data generated must be aligned to satisfy the requirements to make decisions based on the objectives.
Since consistent data aggregation is a crucial aspect of people analytics, it is important to set KPIs to evaluate performances in a periodic manner for effective decision-making.
A few years ago, not many people knew how to establish an association between HR and analytics. Today with the help of people analytics, companies are able to streamline operations pertaining to the workplace and reduce process errors. It is effective in many other ways such as:
A positive work culture is defined by factors such as productivity, employee morale, work-life balance, performance satisfaction and many others. All of these factors are interconnected and have deeper roots, most of which start from the precedent set by HR executives. People analytics has the ability to pinpoint anomalies, suggest ways to maintain the best environment, and establish standards that demand top performances while maintaining a good work-life balance.
It is important to use the right analytical tools to gain insights. For those who did not have a brush with analytics yet, the perception in their minds is advanced technology with mind-boggling complications. But even tools that we use on a daily basis, like MS Excel, is an effective tools for conducting analysis. There are a variety of tools that can be used, like PowerBI, Qlik, Tableau, SAS, R, Python, Excel, and many more. Each tool comes with its own set of features that can be useful for your objectives. Vega HR gives you the opportunity to measure insights all in one place, providing you with the exact components of the data that can help you in better decision-making.
Analytics is all about asking questions about the data. The more questions we ask, the more insights we gain and the better decisions we make. So it is important to have clarity about the objectives that need to be achieved and the questions that come with it.
People analytics gives us an opportunity to use large volumes of otherwise unused data for decision-making and creating strategy. So it is important to constantly update it to suit our objectives better by taking constant feedback and reviewing the impact of our decisions.
With our increasing dependence on technology, many organizations have embraced analytics as the way forward for better strategy and decision-making. People Analytics is starting to become an indispensable tool for HR managers across the globe, since the scope of its usage is only starting to expand. It complements the important role that HR has in an organization and helps give a better perspective.
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