Data has been essential to corporate decision-making for decades. In fact, it’s widely acknowledged to be essential by corporate leaders. 70% of companies say they believe people analytics is an important part of decision-making.
So why do only 29% of HR representatives believe their organisations are good or very good at making positive changes based on people analytics?
It seems there’s a gap between what companies believe and what they’re capable of achieving. There are plenty of HR applications and agencies that can help close that gap. But to convince leaders to allocate funding to quality data analytics for HR, they first have to understand the value.
Here are four ways people analytics adds value to and improve your business results:
Write Better Job Descriptions
In a 2017 survey, 77% of respondents said that the job description content was where they made their decision about whether to apply for a job. It is essential that job descriptions are clear about not only what the job entails. They need to be clear about the company’s culture and whom they are targeting, too.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with job descriptions is their susceptibility to bias. Unconscious use of biased language can exclude specific groups of people from the outset. Think how this affects the overall diversity of your employees.
AI based on people analytics can help you identify specific biased language. It allows you to rewrite your job descriptions to engender equity and inclusivity from the very beginning of your employee journey.
Improve Employee Experience
One of the big challenges of the workplace since the pandemic is that people are demanding a work environment that mirrors the speed, intuition and customisation of the organisations they deal with outside of work.
People analytics can be used to help improve the work environment. With that, it can create a better experience for employees. Employee happiness leads to better productivity and engagement. Make sure to communicate to your employees how you intend to use their data, following data privacy laws.
Find Your Idea Makers and Influencers
One of the commonly missed opportunities among those collecting and analysing data is the tendency to rely on predictive analytics. They are ignoring relational analytics. Relational analytics offer some interesting insights that you can’t get just by collecting individual data.
Using relational data you can identify the people most likely to have good ideas. Previously, there was a false assumption that the idea makers could best be found in a company’s higher positions. However, studies of constraint (how tightly bound to a small community of people you are) show that people of low constraint have a higher frequency of good ideas.
You can also identify those most likely to influence others. Research has shown that senior level employees are less likely to exert influence than people in more informal positions.
By identifying these trends in your company, you can shape positive change.
Identify Your Best Teams
Relational analytics can also help you identify teams that meet important criteria for identifying their efficiency potential. The first criterion is internal density, or how connected they are to each other. The second is external range, or their individual outside connections. If their outside connections overlap, the team has low external range. If they don’t overlap, the team has high external range.
Teams with high internal density and high external range are likely to be highly efficient. Teams with low internal density and high external range are likely to be highly innovative.
It also goes without saying that analytics can help you identify challenges in your company as well. Regardless of whether the news is good or bad, analytics can help you make your company even better. You create equity, improve workers’ experience and identify individual and group strengths and areas of development.
With the increased need to become data savvy, HR teams have a unique opportunity to demonstrate their flexibility. We provide in-house training to help HR professionals enhance their people analytics. Contact us today to find out how we can support your HR team becoming an insightful and caring team.