Making the Most of Your Workforce Data

HR analytics provides ways to better interpret your workforce data in order to facilitate smarter business decisions. It allows you to capitalize on several different tools to help improve your overall workforce planning, management and employee satisfaction. To enhance your business performance, understanding workforce data is essential.

What is HR Analytics?

HR analytics is a way of managing your business data using a variety of HR analyses and reporting options that can help inform operations, planning, management and employee behavior, thus contributing to business success. By utilizing HR analytics, you’ll receive stronger insights into your data, which can improve identification of trends and patterns that matter.

HR analytics is a powerful way to add value to your business using data that’s unique to your organization. It helps to align HR strategies with workforce management techniques to create more efficient internal processes while optimizing planning and performance.

Benefits of Using HR Analytics

Since HR reporting uses data to provide insight on business performance, it’s an essential component to ongoing success. It allows business leaders and HR teams to gain a better understanding of their employee data, which can then be used to optimize practices and performance across departments. HR analytics can also help identify problematic areas that may be causing operational issues so they can be addressed in a timely manner. While tracking performance through HR reporting is an indispensable part of any business, HR analytics takes things a little further. Some of the potential benefits of using HR analytics include:

• Attracting and retaining talent
• Operational improvements
• Improved employee engagement
• Positive employee experience
• Stronger brand value
• Address knowledge and skill gaps
• Regulate costs and risk mitigation
• Identify compensation-related trends

The degree to which you decide to use HR analytics in your business will determine its overall impact on your organization. To get the most out of your efforts, HR analytics paired with industry-specific expertise and reliable support is recommended.

How to Use HR Analytics in Your Business

Your employee data can be used to provide insight on internal trends, employee performance and ongoing internal development. There are several different ways to implement analyses techniques depending on your desired area of improvement. Some ways to use HR analytics in your business include:

Talent Recruitment and Management

By analyzing talent management and recruitment efforts, you can stay in line with market trends to prepare for future hiring needs. HR analytics allows you to track ability and efficacy in regard to sourcing and recruiting new talent while properly managing new hires.

Employee Experience

A 2019 study by the Harvard Business Review found that employee satisfaction is directly related to productivity and engagement within a company.¹ Additionally, having access to benefits is often considered part of a positive employee experience. By tracking interactions using performance management reviews and satisfaction surveys you can gain a stronger understanding of what employees think about their roles in a company in addition to their employer. HR analytics can often track benefits-related data, providing you with the feedback you need to enact positive changes in the future.

Employee Engagement

It’s normal, and even beneficial, for employees to use time off throughout the year, but absenteeism is more than the occasional day off. When employees don’t feel engaged and aligned with their organization, they’re more likely to display habitual absenteeism, which affects productivity and overall morale of an office. HR analytics can identify employee engagement trends within your SMB to help reduce absenteeism, improve productivity levels and decrease turnover.

Employee Retention

With critical compensation insights and a detailed view into wages and bonus breakdowns, you can make more informed decisions and stay competitive in an ever-changing environment. This can help boost employee satisfaction and thus, retention rates.

Implementing HR Analytics

There are several ways HR analytics can benefit your business, but first you need to take the proper steps to create a supporting framework. This allows you to better understand areas of focus in order to create a methodology that will enhance your business’s success. Some important steps to creating a targeted HR analytics platform include:

1. Consider Your Desired Outcomes
   For effective analytics, you need to consider where your business can improve. While not all problems are easily identifiable, take some time to try and summarize your current workforce in conjunction with your desired outcomes. Before you implement any HR analytics tool, determine why you need them in the first place. This gives you more direction and a better baseline for comparison.
   
   
2. Create a Project Statement
   Once you’ve determined your motivation for improvements, conduct internal research and gather any industry data or knowledge from experts in respective fields. Discuss onboarding and training best practice procedures with HR professionals, consider surveying employees and talking to managers about ongoing employee performance reviews and satisfaction. This allows you to create a project statement, or goal, for your HR analytics solution.
   
   
3. Gather Data Appropriately
   Next, take the time to gather the appropriate data for comparison. Always make sure that you utilize high-quality data that meets ethical and security standards. You may want to begin this analysis with new data or you may decide to include existing data. Either is acceptable as long as you’re consistent across different fields. The data collected should be relevant, nondiscriminatory in collection and use, and align with data privacy compliance. Include data sources from different areas—HR, payroll, benefits, operations—to get a comprehensive understanding of your workforce.
   
   
4. Establish Key Performance Indicators
   Identify how you will monitor changes during workforce analysis by determining what your key performance indicators are. This could be a change in turnover rate, length of vacant position, employee satisfaction level or anything else you choose to monitor.
   
   
5. Organize Data
   When you begin receiving data, it should be organized in a way that helps you quickly assess changes and encourage engagement of those reviewing it. This can be automated when you utilize the right HR analytics solution, such as TriNet’s Workforce Analytics tool. You’ll receive access to user-friendly, customizable and engaging dashboards that provide snapshots into your human resources data along with compensation, turnover and organizational growth by function, role or location. The dashboard is updated in real-time to provide ongoing clarity regarding your progress.
   
   
6. Analyze and Interpret
   Finally, it’s important that you analyze and interpret the data in regard to your organizational goals. This allows you to make more educated decisions to better advance your mission while improving overall workforce efficiency. It’s important to delegate tasks accordingly and provide that everyone understands what they’re responsible for doing.

The degree to which you implement HR analytics into your business should be dynamic. As technology continues to evolve, so do analytics and machine learning capabilities. Automation has improved tremendously over the years, allowing for ongoing analysis, calculations and optimization regarding workplace data. While there are challenges in utilizing HR analytics, the benefits can be tremendous. This is especially true when paired with HR professionals who can provide expertise and support.

Investing in Professional Workforce Analytics to Support Your Business

The success of your business is facilitated by the strength of your workforce and procedures that are implemented on a daily basis. TriNet’s Workforce Analytics can help you gain meaningful insight and identify the trends that matter to you and your business, so you can make smarter business decisions based on real data. Visualize your HR, payroll and TriNet-sponsored benefits data through pre-built and customizable dashboards that updates in real time, gain critical compensation insights using custom analytics, and access dozens of workforce reports.

TriNet understands that success doesn’t stop with technology, which is why we offer Workforce Analytics as a technology solution that, combined with access to HR experts and tools, can help your business stay ahead of the game. Learn how TriNet’s comprehensive HR solutions can help your business today.