7 hacks in workforce analytics that enable businesses to ace talent management
If you don’t know your workers, how will you make that journey to productivity? Industry 4.0 gives you a ready reckoner that analyses employees, giving you the seven tenets that enhance the skillset of your team.
Workforce analytics is a way of employing statistical tools and methodologies that enable company leaders to optimise human resources management by leveraging data-mined intelligence. Enterprises, cognizant of the link between individual performance and organisational profitability, are increasingly adopting workforce analytics to map, analyse, and assess employee behaviour and trends.
These tools are assisting HR managers in better understanding and managing their employees, from the time a professional is recruited to when they exit the organisation, and everything in between. The following are some of the ways companies are harnessing the power of workforce analytics to achieve talent management goals:
1. Conducting efficient hiring
Managers use AI and ML-enabled processes like capability analytics and potential index mapping to gauge the level of skills present internally at a given time and determine how well the succession pipeline is capable of filling vacant leadership positions that arise in the future. To build a talent pipeline plan which is revised annually, there are many metrics that need to be factored in to conduct effective hiring. These include the number of candidates to be screened, the time that will be consumed in the process, selecting recruitment channels that can supply the best talent, and so on.
Workforce analytics enables business leaders to also manage post-recruitment factors such as the retention rate and turnover rate with the end-goal of ensuring robust RoI in mind. Comparative analytics and benchmarking further assist recruiters to ensure that compensation and benefits to fresh hires are aligned with the latest market standards and individual experience.
2. Augmenting the effectiveness of training programmes
Availability of robust career growth prospects is a key component of quality EX, and a major factor which motivates an employee to forge a long-term relationship with their organisation. Professionals today need to continuously reskill and upskill to stay relevant in a rapidly-evolving business ecosystem. The onus falls on organisations to keep their talent agile with the necessary L&D tools and resources.
HR managers leverage pretraining assessment to identify the degree of skill gap among the employees and drive L&D initiatives accordingly. Further, post-training assessments allow managers to gauge the effectiveness of the training along with tracking corollaries including value-added benefits, training ROI, etc.
3. Bolstering communication across all verticals
Just like managers expect employees to possess up-to-date skills and add value to the organisation, employees also expect continuous feedback and growth opportunities from their seniors. Establishing a transparent communication channel with its employees becomes business imperative for an organisation. It should not only be able to clearly convey what it expects from the employees in terms of KPIs and KRAs but also offer them comprehensive as well as regular feedback and performance review. All of which becomes possible with on boarding workforce analytics which helps employees in better understanding their performance evaluation and employers in presenting key evaluation metrics of productivity, business impact, and RoI generated from their work.
4. Optimising employee experience
Employee experience (EX) is an extremely vast term considering that it encompasses all the aspects of an individual’s professional journey within an organisation. Therefore, to raise the overall quality of EX, it is necessary for managers to map various touchpoints of an employee’s engagement with the organisation and vice versa. HR managers leverage various employee-feedback mechanisms such as engagement surveys to collect relevant data to achieve the said objectives. However, as befits the dynamism of the modern business landscape, pulse surveys are quickly gaining traction among new-age employers. Some companies are even empowering bots working on the model of AI-based analytics capability for such pulse surveys to continuously offer feedback to individuals as well as analyse mood, behaviour, and stress levels of employees. Such bots, then, forward reports to managers about any stress or bad mood of employees so that they can have one-to-one conversation with the latter to alleviate the challenges.
As opposed to engagement surveys which typically take place annually or bi-annually, pulse surveys are quicker, shorter, and more frequent. Regular interaction with employees offers managers more data to work upon, enabling them to derive more accurate and effective actionable insights. This gives enterprises a fairer idea about the areas of improvement including leadership performance, organizational ergonomics, workplace culture, etc.
5. Establishing and achieving new business milestones
The leadership is tested especially during the times of mergers and acquisitions or a major overhaul of existing technological infrastructure, when the workforce may associate the event with the loss of business vision. In such cases, it becomes essential for the senior management to instil trust and optimism among the employees by conveying – and motivating the workforce to work towards realising – the evolved business vision and milestones. It is here that workforce analytics again steps into the picture to help managers drive workforce modelling and devise effective business strategies around the requirement of leadership and skilled individuals in the wake of major management or workflow changes.
6. Establishing the corelation between employee performance and business growth
Workforce analytics can reveal the disparity between real-time productivity and performance metrics. Managers can leverage the data generated to identify time-consuming pockets of work, and accordingly streamline the workflow to save time for professionals in high-paying positions. This can have a direct positive impact on the business bottom line. As mundane, monotonous and routine work goes out of the way of talented individuals, they are better able to contribute in their role and fell more aligned and committed to the organisation.
7. Curbing employee turnover
Using the power of predictive analytics, managers can map employee behavioural patterns to track the probability of employee resignations. With relevant data on hand, organisations can proactively work towards improving retention by establishing skill-building and L&D mechanisms internally. They can even prepare for the employee exit aftermath by building a secondary talent pipeline by scaling-up competencies of other high-potential (HiPos) employees and getting them ready for bigger responsibilities.
In this manner, by actively integrating tech-enabled apparatuses with management best practices, companies can transform data from being an input fodder to being a key business-driving currency. This gives them an advantageous edge in the rapidly-transforming business landscape, enabling them to boost their operational productivity and organisational profitability at the same time.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
(Edited by Suruchi Kapur- Gomes)
