The Power of Data to Transform People Analytics

As our ability to capture and process data has grown, businesses increasingly rely on analytics to drive critical business decisions: improved financial analytics, sales analytics, marketing analytics. The HR discipline is now entering this data revolution and is using data beyond just Core HR and compensation to build insights that enhance employees’ work experience across the entire lifecycle.

New HR technology solutions now do a better job of collecting people’s data. Although this has opened up the opportunity to build interesting analytics for leaders, these solutions have fallen short in servicing managers and employees. Imagine a better understanding of the characteristics that define highly successful managers to inform development plans. What about analyzing patterns of interactions that help us identify collaborative, inclusive teams? Shouldn’t data identify unusual changes in reporting (i.e. 3 managers in 4 months) and spur proactive outreach to employees? How about surfacing relevant training and networking events based on employee’s career goals?

I’ve spent my career as a technologist building products that use data to drive decisions: airline passenger forecasting, hotel revenue management, retail pricing, and data management for digital advertising. In all these previous companies, the focus has been around achieving an optimal outcome through segmentation or patterns identified through data. Couldn’t the same be done for HR? I’m excited about the potential behind data and machine learning to help employees and their companies build stronger culture — this is where I ultimately see the power of People Analytics and the value our Eskalera Employee Experience platform will bring to organizations.

What is People Analytics?

People Analytics is the use of data insights to help HR drive decisions around their employees. At its most basic level, you can use data to help understand retention, recruiting, performance, and compensation.

Highly advanced People Analytics will draw not only insights for a given individual, but understand, analyze, and highlight patterns based on interactions amongst employees. It can recognize patterns over time and help map behaviors to outcomes.

How does it help my organization?

Organizations benefit from People Analytics because they can start to make data-driven hiring, talent development, and retention decisions more consistently. Being able to tie insights based on performance, diversity, tenure, and learning and development data all help drive a more comprehensive view of the employee and how to strengthen that employee’s relationship with their employer.

Individual employees also benefit from People Analytics. Insights can be used to help identify career and mentorship opportunities and highlight the specific training needed for advancement. A good People Analytics system provides continuous insight on how to improve the employee experience, making employees feel supported by their company and excited about work. We’ll explore some examples of organization and employee benefits in subsequent posts.

What makes a strong People Analytics platform/practice?

As with any data-driven decision-making practice, strong People Analytics depends on having solid data behind your insights. You then need to have the processes in place to synthesize the insights and translate those insights into implementable actions.

People Analytics is not new: historically, large companies have employed teams of HR analysts or hired outside consultancies. Today, however, cheap and available cloud computing allows companies of all means and sizes to invest in progressive HR technology.

The value of moving People Analytics into a technology platform is that you build insights and processes that are continuous and scalable. Investing in an integrated, self-healing, and elastic data platform allows companies to focus on their business priorities and outcomes, rather than upkeep of multiple database connectors.

Having built and implemented data-driven tools in multiple industries, I’ve seen commonalities across every successful project. So how do you get started?

• Evaluate and consider your data sources
• Know your business outcomes and align metric and measurements to those outcomes
• Make the benefit to the consumer (in this case, the employee) clear

In subsequent blog posts, we will explore the key points above as they relate to successfully implementing a data-driven People Analytics platform and the power behind Eskalera’s technology and analytics.

Originally published at https://eskalera.com on September 25, 2019.