This is a guest post from Tim Ferguson, a writer and editor of Marketing Digest. 

Just as digital marketers use analytics to understand their customers better, the management also seeks to understand their employee needs better through people analytics.

Particularly now that everyone is working from home, having systematic methods in place to understand the workforce better in the absence of face-to-face conversations is critical. In fact, companies are doubling their efforts to close the “capability gap” and build better leadership.

According to a Deloitte study, people analytics is quickly becoming the new currency for companies, playing a crucial role in talent acquisition and business decision-making, with over 70% of businesses investing in people analytics solutions.

It is not a surprise since people analytics helps boost job offer acceptance rates, optimize compensation, and reduce HR help tickets for HR personnel.

But what does the term “people analytics” exactly mean? It essentially involves using technology and statistical methods to study employee data and implement solutions that best serve employee needs.

The objective of people analytics is to make HR practices more sophisticated by being data-driven. By using and tracking the right metrics, HR managers can get critical insights into what gaps exist in the employee experience, what tools and processes can best serve those gaps, and what predictive measures can be taken to meet future needs as the company evolves.

How people analytics drives better business outcomes

Providing a worthwhile employee experience calls for multiple systems, tools, and capabilities to work together in sync. That is because the employee experience itself is holistic and needs to respond to the employee’s needs and goals while ensuring optimal productivity and collaboration. Some aspects to this include:

• Technological and analytical tools to provide the proper assistance at the right touchpoints
  
• Processes tailored to the employee experience by removing obstacles and minimizing the gap between problem and solution
  
• A culture that fosters engagement boosts motivation and improves retention
  

In all of this, people data plays a critical role in terms of shedding light on what tools, processes, and cultural elements the employees actually want.

Tips on ensuring the optimal people analytics experience

Like every tool, people analytics needs to be used responsibly to yield the desired results. Most importantly, it needs to be trusted by the employees — who are, after all, at the heart of it. If your company is thinking about leveraging people analytics for a better employee experience, here is how you can:

1. Enable digitization in the flow of work

In a world of work that is increasingly virtual, the volumes of data available to understand and predict employee behavior will continue to grow at a rapid pace. This was not so a few years ago as many companies had a closed approach to analytics in HR.

Now that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation adoption by a few years, readiness is not a serious issue anymore. Agility and collaboration are critical and data comes in handy in optimizing remote and hybrid work environments.

In other words, by leveraging analytics in HR, companies can better manage the workforce through improved predictions and faster decisions.

Platforms like WalkMe and Pendo can help design compelling, bespoke employee experiences, optimize workforce planning. Moreover, some of the other WalkMe alternatives even offer features that can help companies drive greater business performance.

2. Be proactive and not reactive

At the start of the pandemic, the speed with which organizations moved online without disrupting business continuity was of the essence.

HR personnel armed with data were in a better place to respond to the growing employee demands for wellness and ensure it was business as usual — only online.

To ensure efficient change management and employee experience, it might be worth deploying more frequent surveys to get a sense of what your workforce is feeling.

Map out exactly what your organization expects to achieve with that (are there any specific people metrics you want to measure?) and how that can be best accomplished.

This is an excellent exercise to obtain the support of the top leadership and also helps you be more precise with what you are aiming to do at the onset. Conduct short surveys regularly to avoid survey fatigue and to gain greater visibility of your employees’ experiences.

3. Determine capacity utilization

The critical contribution of a people analytics tool is to understand capacity utilization — in other words, how the people of the organization are functioning. There are five aspects to this:

• What the actual capacity of the team is versus how much is being used
  
• What activities the team is carrying out
  
• Which team members are doing the tasks
  
• The processes used to carry out the task
  
• The tools and applications on which the work is being done
  

A financial services organization was able to improve its workforce planning process due to people analytics. The accuracy of its hiring plan went up to 95% from 78%, and it increased the accuracy of its headcount plan to 95% from 60%.

Therefore, findings on the above-mentioned aspects are invaluable to planning out hiring needs, identifying resource wastages, reallocating tasks for maximum productivity, and crafting employee-friendly policies on matters like flexi-time and workload assignment.

4. Be transparent about how the data is being used

Many employees equate people analytics with employee surveillance, and some organizations have actually done that in the past.

To dispel fears that everyone is being monitored, have a structured plan around who has access to the data and what purposes it is being used for.

In addition, frequent and open communication with everyone will clear up the perception of people analytics and demonstrate that although the management uses data to spot behavioral changes, it is committed to respecting people’s privacy and would not do anything untoward.

Let it run, observe, iterate

An excellent way to introduce people analytics into your firm is to let it run in the background for a while simply. Observe the trends that it picks up and then decide what policy changes you want to deploy. Are you getting the kind of data you had expected? Is the frequency and quantity of the data inputs up to the mark? Is the tool itself easy to use?

In other words, decide whether the tool you have chosen is the best one to accomplish your people management goals or whether you want to test the waters with a different kind of people analytics platform. Whatever it is — take your time to arrive at conclusions once you deploy people analytics.

This is a guest post from Tim Ferguson, a writer and editor of Marketing Digest. 

Author Bio

Tim Ferguson is a writer and editor of Marketing Digest. He enjoys writing about SEO, content marketing, online reputation management, social media, AI, and Big Data. When he is not writing and editing for Marketing Digest, he spends time on learning more about content marketing and getting better at it.

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