10 Lessons Talent Leaders Have Learned by Utilizing Workforce Analytics
Whether your company needs to diversify its leadership roles, streamline a lengthy talent search, implement a better way of tracking employee overtime hours or reduce the advertising budget by Q3, each goal is no small feat. That’s where data analytics software can come in handy.
By gleaning information from a host of artificial intelligence and other resources, you’ll be moving the entire team one step further in the right direction, enabling the business to improve and stay ahead of the curve.
While more information may seem overwhelming to some, by providing the proper training, delving deeper into insights behind the research and determining its value for staff performance rates, you’ll not only introduce a new mindset but strengthen those key performance indicators one quarter at a time. Below experts from Forbes Human Resources Council share the lessons they’ve discovered about workforce data.
1. It Informs Leadership Decisions
Data is paramount for human resource strategy development and decisions. It should be used to inform your decisions. A simple way to start is to look at your existing metrics and build out a dashboard so you have a snapshot of key metrics to begin with that can inform your actions. As you get comfortable, you can dive further into the people analytics realm with data studio and leading and lagging indicators. – Katya Laviolette, 1Password
2. It Doesn’t Tell The Whole Story
Be mindful. Educate leaders on the fact that the data set has limitations and does not tell the whole story. It’s an important tool to help manage the business and inform leaders, but it shouldn’t be the only tool. Additional information is often needed to provide context or complete the picture being told by the numbers. – Laura Giangiuli, CALIBRE Systems, Inc.
3. It Provides A Visual Roadmap
Create a vision for people’s data with sound research and alignment with leadership. Ensure that the data quality is established for the data output. Hire people with the right data and tech background who also have the right endurance for the journey. Refine the vision and create the roadmap for target tools, reports, dashboards and automation. Have a strategy in place to share data using dashboards to vet quality and grow leadership capabilities. – David Alsop, Ultradent Products, Inc.
4. It Solves Unanswered Questions
First, define what questions you’d like to have answered. Is it an assumption you want to evaluate or a new idea you wish to explore? In any case, start with the data you already have, looking at the information from a different perspective. What does each data point say individually? Do you notice a pattern when looking at the entire data set? Verify your findings with someone outside of your immediate team. Do they see or read it the same way as you? Build rapport and momentum from there. – Tatjana Tasan, MEETYOO
5. It Sparks Further Guidance From Experts
More data doesn’t equate to good or useful data. Furthermore, useful data doesn’t mean actionable data. It’s important to get clear on what data is necessary to have and how you intend to use it. Once you have data you believe to be useful, you need to go back to the people you sourced it from to understand it. The numbers need a contextual narrative before you can institute meaningful improvement. – Gregory Pontrelli, Lausanne Business Solutions
6. It Educates Leaders On The Market
Get started by considering your audience. Who is going to be using the results of the analytics, and what do they need to see in order to achieve organizational objectives or to do their jobs better? Asking these questions will help narrow down the intimidating scope of workforce analytics to something impactful and achievable while you continue to build your capabilities in this area. – Jennifer Rozon, McLean & Company
7. It Identifies Quick-Win Projects For The Team
A great way to start out with workforce analytics is to engage with business leaders. Too often, analytics teams tackle projects that they think will add a great deal of value to the business, but in reality, are problems of little importance to decision makers. Discuss organizational issues with leaders and ask for their ideas of what’s causing the issues. This will help identify quick-win projects. – Brett Wells, Perceptyx
8. It Filters The Most Useful Information
The best way to implement consistent sharing of workforce analytics at a company that may not be used to this kind of data is to first understand which metrics are most important to senior leaders. There is typically a lot of data available and you likely don’t need to share all of it, so it’s important to identify what is most valuable, present it in an easy-to-understand dashboard and add context. – Katya Daniel, Golden Hippo
9. It Boosts Team Confidence Levels
Use a reflective approach to review and examine the data from three perspectives: past performance, current performance and anticipated outcomes. Using this type of systemic approach to examine, analyze and interpret data will build confidence in the analytics interface, help the novice understand data alignment and enable the practice of successful predictive analyses. – Iris Ware, City of Detroit
10. It Deciphers Historical Trends
Data analytics requires some skill and training to ensure you are getting the full picture. Trend analysis, versus using a point in time, is important to understand. Before you decide to make a change based on monthly or quarterly data, you may want to look at the historical trend to ensure the change isn’t seasonal or caused by some other action. A course in data analytics would be very helpful. – Gordon Pelosse, CompTIA, the Computing Technology Industry Association
Source: GWFM Research
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