Five Key Benefits of People Analytics Technology and Skills for Organizations

From decision making to staff retention, having people analytics technology and HR professionals with this skill set offers numerous benefits that can make an organization more competitive, and ultimately, more successful. To gain a deeper understanding of how people analytics achieves this, we spoke with Ilia Maor, Manager, HR Technology and Analytics at York Region. Ilia also contributed to the development of courses for the new Postgraduate Certificate in People Analytics for HR Professionals, now offered at The Chang School.

Whether your organization is in the early stages or has fully rolled out a people analytics solution, here are some key benefits of having an HR team with people analytics skills.

Improved Decision-Making

People analytics provides data-driven insights that help in making more informed and objective decisions related to employee management, hiring, promotions, and talent management. Without using data for decision making, Ilia warns that your organization could be missing out on huge opportunities.

“You might lose people because you haven’t invested in listening to your employees,” he says. “Employee listening is becoming a big thing and there’s a huge cost to not paying attention to it. High-potential staff and leaders might be thinking of leaving or actively searching for opportunities. The reasons may be available in the data but if you aren’t actively looking or listening, you may be too late to act on those insights.”

Examples of employee listening include surveys, candidate feedback, onboarding feedback, interview questions, as well as stay and exit interviews. Someone with people analytics skills can take this data from these sources using data analytics software and support the development of proactive strategies to mitigate negative outcomes like those mentioned earlier around employee retention in the future.

“The cost of not using this data is high,” says Ilia. “The benefits of using it is that it allows your organization to prevent certain things from happening, or at the very least gain insight into indicators of something bad coming.”

He goes on to explain that an example of this would be when an organization has made a policy change and now half of the exit surveys are citing that employees are leaving the organization because of the new policy or that prospective candidates are rejecting offers at an increasing rate and providing feedback. This can be themed, analyzed, and hopefully used in policy review and evaluation.

Enhanced Employee Experience

By analyzing data on employee engagement, satisfaction, and performance, organizations can identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to enhance the overall employee experience.

For instance, Ilia said people who are pleased with their experience at an organization are more likely to recommend it as a place to work for other people in their close personal and professional circles.

“It’s getting a sense of the data around the general sentiment within the organization and looking at trends like internal movement and compensation to see whether your organization has clear career paths in place for your employees,” he says. “The opposite risk of that is not knowing and hoping that somehow automatically you’ll be able to know these things.Hoping is not really an effective strategy.”

Ilia illustrates this with the example of measuring your talent pipeline at the candidate level to make sure you are closing gaps in areas like time to fill a role. “You can look at the competitiveness of your organization’s employer value proposition compared to others,” says Ilia. “You can also consider the reasons employees are leaving – is it for more pay, opportunities for growth or training, or culture?”

Increased Retention Rates

People analytics can identify patterns and predictors of employee turnover, allowing organizations to address issues proactively and implement retention strategies to reduce attrition.

An organization should pay attention to a lot of internal movement related to compensation or other reasons, Ilia points out.

In order to make sense of the data, Ilia says it’s important to understand research principles, data analytics, as well as knowing the business inside out. He adds that it’s also important to know how to use the data to influence and convince leadership of the imperative and importance to act.

“[HR professionals] need to understand the types of things that can drive employee and candidate decisions, which aren’t covered by analytics. This is where curiosity comes in as the overarching piece.”

Optimized Workforce Planning

These skills help in forecasting workforce needs, identifying skills gaps, and planning for future talent requirements, ensuring that the organization is well-prepared to meet its goals.

At the leadership level, this is where people analytics data is crucial in making decisions.

“You always start with identifying the problem you’re trying to solve,” says Ilia. “It takes honest organizational introspection to figure out what encourages people to stay with your organization but also to determine why some choose to leave. Then you have a great opportunity to understand how to deal with those realities. That then pushes leadership to ask whether they have the resources, technology, people, and processes to gather and analyze that information. It’s a technology roadmap exercise where you try to understand what data you need and what technology is needed to collect, analyze, and synthesize that data into compelling narratives for your organization. ”

Cost Savings

By improving hiring processes, reducing turnover, and optimizing workforce planning, people analytics can lead to significant cost savings for the organization.

And ultimately, that can make or break your organization when it comes to success.