The only thing more frustrating than trying to keep up with the endless demands of HR is not knowing whether all that work is making a difference. Analytics are the key to measuring what’s working and what’s not. They help you recruit and retain great talent, and they provide a powerful pulse check on the wellness and morale of your workforce, but where do you even begin?
In the past, it seemed like only large corporations had the budget and bandwidth to collect and analyze data from their workforce, but the tools are now well within reach of any small to medium-sized business. It’s well within your power to understand why your people are staying, why they’re leaving, and how to identify problematic trends before they take root.
What do analytics reveal about my company?
Even when you genuinely care about the well-being of your team, you will always be too close to the situation to objectively assess the culture you’ve built. Analytics give you the invaluable view of how your HR management strategies and tactics are performing.
There are three key areas where analytics reveal powerful insights.
- Assessing Your Workplace Culture – Learn what’s working and what isn’t in your efforts to build a workplace environment that offers job satisfaction and personal growth.
- Identifying Factors in Talent Retention – By analyzing turnover data and identifying trends, you can proactively address underlying issues before they escalate.
- Identifying What Works in Talent Recruitment – By analyzing data on recruitment success rates, time-to-hire, and candidate satisfaction, you can identify areas for improvement and refine your hiring processes.
Below, we’ll walk through the techniques you can use to gather this data.
Use Employee Surveys for Targeted Research and Quantitative Responses
Employee surveys can be powerful pulse checks for broad subjects like leadership, work environment, and work-life balance. They can also target specific concerns like whether employees feel trained and equipped for their roles. They quickly identify where your organization is falling short and where training or even a consultant might be needed to right the ship.
One of their greatest advantages is the opportunity to make them anonymous, setting employees free to be fully transparent and honest.
The key to a successful employee survey is being concise and staying focused on a particular issue. Long-winded surveys don’t go over well with employees, but they will respond well to a strong focus that helps them understand the contribution they are making.
Though you can always ask some open-ended questions, be sure to ask questions using a rating scale. Rating responses one to four is a popular option since it eliminates a neutral middle and forces people to leave more specific feedback.
Over time, you will find the historical data invaluable, and it is important to store your data in a usable format, something HRIS (Human Resources Information System) software can help with. Xenium utilizes Prism HR in serving clients. Bamboo HR and Workday are other notable platforms you should explore.
Use Both Exit and Stay Interviews to Gather Data
If your organization isn’t consistently conducting exit interviews, it is missing one of the most important sources of data you will ever have regarding employee retention. They are your best opportunity to identify trends in what isn’t working. Maybe employees perceive a lack of career growth opportunities, feel their compensation is low or believe the benefits package is insufficient.
However, it is also critical to explore the other side of your employees’ experiences in your organization. Stay interviews are informal, personal conversations between long-term, high-performance employees and their direct reports.
You want to search out the people who have served the best and stayed the longest and ask them why they have stayed. Ask them a series of questions exploring both the advantages and challenges they have experienced over the years.
You might be wondering how useful data emerges from these informal conversations. If you use a consistent interview format with the same questions and are disciplined in capturing the data, you will start to identify trends in their answers and even be able to generate insightful reports. Again, a strong HRIS software platform can assist you in analyzing responses and identifying trends.
Unleash the Power of Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics takes employee data analysis to the next level by helping organizations anticipate and mitigate potential issues either before they happen or before they get worse.
By leveraging historical data like turnover rates, retention rates, and other relevant metrics, predictive analytics can forecast future trends within your workforce. Armed with this knowledge, you can take proactive steps to forge helpful changes in your workplace culture.
- For instance, if turnover rates are higher than desired among new hires within their first year, it may indicate onboarding difficulties. By analyzing relevant data, such as training completion rates or employee feedback during this period, you can identify pain points and implement changes to streamline the onboarding process and reduce turnover.
- Likewise, if you identify frequent friction between employers and management, you can implement training and coaching solutions on both sides to mitigate the situation before it leads to unnecessary exits of key team members and talent.
The best HRIS platforms offer strong functionality for predictive analytics, and AI tools will soon make it possible to mine your data for even deeper, actionable insights.
Leverage Analytics for Monitoring and Improving Compliance
In addition to using analytics for understanding workplace culture and driving employee engagement, you can also leverage data analysis for monitoring compliance.
By analyzing compliance-related data, such as adherence to state or federal regulations, you can ensure your organization remains up-to-date and avoids penalties. Analytics can also provide insights into areas where you may need to improve or adjust existing processes.
To effectively manage compliance, choose an HRIS platform capable of tracking and reporting on key compliance indicators. This allows you to monitor your organization’s compliance status, identify gaps, and implement necessary corrections quickly and efficiently.
Use Best Practices in Your Compensation Analysis Process
Compensation analysis helps you ensure competitive pay levels, attract top talent, and retain valuable employees.
However, there are two things which make or break the success of your analysis.
- Working from well-defined job descriptions. You can’t perform a proper market analysis with mere job titles. You need to have granular, measurable qualifiers on your job description that allows you to compare apples to apples instead of benchmarking off of a role which, in truth, bears little resemblance to the one being filled in your company.
- Using well-vetted marketing information. Be sure to use reputable compensation software resources like Mercer, Willis Towers Watson (Now WTW), Culpepper, or the ERI (Economic Research Institute). Using well-established sources like this ensures you have access to a wide, reliable data set.
Hire Xenium to Make the Most of Your Data
Xenium’s team of more than 80 HR, payroll, and benefits experts use their expertise in Prism HR’s HRIS platform and more than 20 years of experience to help you use analytics to build a positive workplace culture. Our team helps you put best practices in place for gathering and analyzing your data, and our experience helps us identify patterns and trends you might otherwise miss.
Within your historical data and the data you have yet to collect lie critical, game-changing clues that shut revolving doors with employees, stabilize your workforce, and give you a competitive edge in your marketplace.
In optimizing the way you take care of your people, you optimize your ability to drive revenue and increase productivity. Investing in HR is always the right thing to do for your people, but it is also, always, an investment in growth.
Learn more about our customized HR support services at XeniumHR.com.