Article: The rise of HR Analytics to improve employee engagement

HR Analytics

The rise of HR Analytics to improve employee engagement

Many leading organizations aim to improve the employee experience as a whole instead of narrowly focusing on engagement and culture and this is supported by Human resource analytics. Read on to know how pulse feedback tools, wellness and fitness apps, and employee self-service technologies can help improve employee engagement.
The rise of HR Analytics to improve employee engagement

In a digital world where everything is transparent and easily trackable, employees desire for a productive, engaging, and most importantly an enjoyable work experience. The experience that an employee has in his workspace makes the culture of the company. Now, to enhance the culture or the overall experience of an employee, organizations are developing an integrated focus on bringing together all the workplace, HR, and management practices that affect people’s experiences on the job. A new marketplace of the analytics driven tool and analysis is helping HR departments to understand and enhance this experience. Through new age concepts such as employee journey maps, sentiment analysis, design thinking, and employee net promoter scores, HR departments are now better positioned to measure employee satisfaction.

In a recent research, a productive, positive employee experience emerged as the most desired areas from the Human resource perspective. Similar to marketing where teams have moved beyond customer satisfaction and are focusing on total customer experience, HR is now refocusing its efforts to build strategies, programs, and teams to continually improve the holistic employee experience. Leading-edge companies are adopting advanced methods of analyzing employee data and employ it for their competitive gains. Facebook, Best Buy, Google, Sysco, and others have just begun to understand the ways to ensure the highest productivity, retention of top talent, diversity and engagement, through the power of analytics. If you desire better performance from your top talent then favoring analytics over the general perception is far more beneficial.

 What’s driving this shift to analytics? 

In this increasingly competitive world, companies now want more from their employees. This need has led to the reinvention of several path breaking people practices. Examples include Netflix’s tossing aside of conventional HR absence policies, or Best Buy’s aversion to standard work schedules in its corporate offices. However, the beauty of Analytics is that it helps you gauge accurately whether your fresh management approaches would work for you or not. Moreover, the voluminous big data from Information systems, and social networks or internal social platforms become available for analysis. For example, public relations firm Ketchum analysed its personal networks to determine the ease with which information flowed across teams. 

Today, Organizations are building analytics team because industry has access to data storage and data crunchers. As the levels of differentiation among competitors in an industry decreases, companies now spend more to have diagnostic ideas about their company’s health from the angle of their employees.  In this context, analytics can create a talent value model which can help addresses questions like “Why do employees choose to stay with our company?” Organizations can use analytics to find out what employees like or don’t like and prepare analytical model that will boost retention rates. Such an analytical model can help support managers to assess whether to match a competitor’s recruitment offer, plan personalized performance incentives, or decide the right time to announce promotions or hikes. 

Analytics: Tried and Tested

Predictive analytics can be an amazing tool for companies as it is capable of giving insights into employee benefits, promotions, and talent management, or help in deeper forecasting. For example, analytics can help calculate the efficiency of training courses or to determine which employees will most likely achieve their targets and why. It can give answers to the efficacy of performed CSR initiatives and rank them basis their contribution to corporate culture and employee involvement. There are several leading organizations that have already given a heads up to analytics. For example, Google uses employee performance data to calculate suitable intervention time to help both high- and low-performing employees succeed. 

Best Buy (a leader in HR predictive analytics) can precisely predict the impact of employee engagement on the performance of its stores. The results predict that a 0.1% increase in employee engagement leads to a rise of over $100,000 in the annual income of its store. The tremendous impact of engagement encouraged Best Buy to have quarterly engagement surveys. Calculating the impact of employee engagement on bottom line performance might be tricky but possible with analytics.

Harrah’s Entertainment is renowned for using analytics to pick customers with the best profit potential and to redefine pricing and promotions for the targeted audience. They have extended this approach to people decisions as well by using insights analyzed from data to have the right people in the right jobs. They have also created models that calculate the optimal number of staff members to handle customers at their service points. Today, the company employs analytics to be accountable for the things that are of greatest value to its staff. 

 Successful companies know that happier and healthier employees are more engaged and work with unmatched zeal towards the company’s success. Taking cues from the leading companies, organization must use analytics as such insights from data can have a big impact and boost the efficiency of HR policies. 

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Topics: HR Analytics, Employee Engagement

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