What Is Workforce Analytics? Explain Its Importance.

Introduction 

Workforce analysis makes it possible for businesses to take human resources-related decisions effectively. Operating a business involves many complex factors, including a company’s workforce. Employees can present a variety of qualitative factors instead of clean, hard data. 

However, any organization’s most important asset is its workforce. You can improve your competitive edge by developing a deep understanding of your staff. Your team can benefit from workforce analysis by seeing what works and what doesn’t. Additionally, it can provide employees with the tools they need to succeed. Analyzing workforces begins with understanding what it means. 

What Is Workforce Analytics? 

Analytics for workforce management helps HR teams optimize organizations’ human resources by tracking and measuring data related to employees. By focusing on the return on value for every hire, the field goes far beyond hiring and firing. Furthermore, it provides information about workplace trends, such as possible risk factors, employee satisfaction, etc. 

In addition to evaluating existing staff, workforce analytics can also analyze overall employment trends. Companies can adjust recruitment efforts, measure diversity efforts, or evaluate employee engagement without having to resort to invasive or subjective methods that might generate false results by analyzing when the number of applicants is higher during certain times of the year. 

During the forecast period, the global Workforce Analytics Market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.3% to USD 860.4 Million by 2020. Enterprises are facing the immense challenge of analyzing HR data structure in real-time, driving a rapid increase in the demand for advanced analytical tools and analytics applications.  

Employee collaboration, learning management, talent management, compensation management, recruitment, and learning management are some of the applications available in this market. The market can be classified into different types: solutions and services, deployment types, organization sizes, industries, or regions. 

How Does Workforce Analytics Help in Solving Employee-related Queries? 

Answering strategy questions with workplace analytics requires data analysis and software. These workforce analytics KPI examples can be used to spot trends, analyze performance and monitor them. 

• Talent management and recruitment: Metrics are used by HR teams to measure talent sourcing, recruitment, and talent management. In-demand skills are in high demand, so talent management metrics is a helpful tool for monitoring supply-and-demand trends. 
• Retention of employees: Assessing employee retention helps you determine whether your hiring, training, and HR management strategies are a long-term success for your company. Recruiting costs, lost productivity, and training expenses associated with low retention can affect the bottom line. 
• Experience of employees: This includes interactions between candidates and the company from the moment they start until they leave. Longer-term employee retention is a result of a positive employee experience. The satisfaction of your workers can be gauged by a number of methods, such as employee surveys or performance reviews. 
• Performance metrics: You can use productivity measures and output to track employee performance, such as sales per employee and revenue per employee, as well as other qualitative information. 
• Absenteeism among employees: This category contains more than regular and occasional absences. Are business outcomes being affected by absenteeism among employees or units? It is important to measure and address this when necessary since it can affect productivity and morale. 
• Onboarding, training, and upskilling: Metrics essential in workforce planning show the effectiveness and efficiency of employee onboarding, training, and upskilling. A good KPI to measure is the amount of training spending per employee, the number of new skills acquired, and the number of hours of training annually. 

Example of HR Analytics 

Imagine you are a manager interested in whether highly trained employees perform better than those without training. In order to measure this, you will need to identify which data you need. Data on training completion and employee surveys should be obtained in this case. The employee data from all departments of your company should be collected and analyzed in order to compare your results with benchmarks (history or training completion). 

A correlation analysis between employee satisfaction and training completion rate would be one of this case’s main data analysis methods. By comparing highly trained employees to those who did not complete or failed to complete the training program, you can explore whether highly trained employees are happier. 

An employee turnover red flag may also be identified. We will assume you can analyze whether social engagement, promotion history, salary, and job role all contribute to employee turnover in the absence of social engagement, promotion history, salary, and job role information. In order to enhance employee retention, you can use an algorithm to identify which of these factors needs to be addressed. 

Are They All The Same: Workforce Analytics, HR Analytics, People Analytics, and Talent Analytics!

Let’s understand each of these in detail: 

What is HR Analytics? 

HR Analytics can be defined as follows: 

The gathering and use of talent data, commonly referred to as “people analytics,” is done to enhance important business and talent outcomes. Professionals in HR analytics assist HR leaders in creating data-driven insights to guide hiring decisions, enhance workforce operations, and foster a great employee experience. 

Employee retention and time to hire are two examples of HR metrics that are used in HR Analytics. 

What Is People Analytics? 

HR leaders use statistical methods and techniques to analyze large sets of data about businesses and employees in the context of People Analytics. As a result of this process, better decisions can be made, and tangible returns can be demonstrated on investments in competitive talent and people. 

What Is Workforce Analytics? 

Two definitions were shortlisted from two references after a literature review. 

A part of HR analytics, Workforce analytics tracks and measures employee data and optimizes human resource management and decision-making within organizations. By focusing on the return on value for every hire, the field goes beyond hiring and firing. 

Generally speaking, workforce analytics refers to the analysis of employees within an organization. Employees include on-site, remote, gig, freelance, consultant, and other individuals who work in different organizational capacities. 

What Is Talent Analytics? 

Talent analytics focuses on analyzing large sets of people, using statistics and technology, on making better organizational and operational decisions. An organization’s talent analytics can be viewed as a holistic and data-driven view of its staff using various business intelligence tools and systems. By measuring actual results and measuring success, companies can make better decisions. 

Benefits of Workforce Analytics

Companies and their human resources teams implement a variety of strategies in an effort to make the workplace a better place for employees and executives alike. In order to achieve this goal, workforce analytics is a useful tool. Here are some benefits organizations looking for change can benefit from using these tools: 

• Employee Engagement
  Are your employees having difficulty getting along or collaborating on a project that is important to them? These pain points can be identified with data analytics, providing executives with information regarding why certain partnerships are failing. These materials enable companies to reorganize their teams and work with employees to find solutions to their current problems as they see fit. It is recommended that companies implement workplace analytics to improve relationships across their organizations, according to People Insight. Detailed analysis can be conducted on the hiring process, managerial readiness, and the first-year progress of the company. In addition to improving the interaction between workers, these tools can also enhance executive-HR relationships.
• Training Efficiency
  Although most workforce analytics tools measure broad trends within an organization, some offer users the opportunity to focus on specific performance factors, such as attendance, efficiency, productivity, and working hours. Managers can use this data to identify employees who are struggling to perform and engage with them proactively to find ways to improve. The work-life balance is also blurred due to employees working too much, as was the case during the pandemic. Managers can lower employee turnover by alleviating or optimizing work volume for employees who work too much after hours.
• Churn Rate
  The way promotions are handled within your company shouldn’t be ignored if a lack of career advancement opportunities is driving resignations. Listen to the managers of the employees that are most likely to be promoted, and incorporate their feedback into your plan. In classic promotion metrics, the number of people who have received a promotion is simply counted, but it is not indicated whether the promotions came within the group or came from somewhere else. Rather than looking at promotions actioned, which indicates the percentage of promotions from the organization where someone was working at the beginning of the review period, you should instead look at promotions actioned, which gives you an accurate picture of which manager grows talent well.
• Absence
  Analyzing employee attendance data will reveal trends and insights that can be used to improve your operation. With data, policies can be improved, incentives can be offered, employees can be rewarded, problems can be caught early, and better decisions can be made. It is possible to address both current issues and potential future ones by analyzing attendance data. It can also be helpful to plan ahead and adjust workplace practices to improve outcomes by comparing attendance and other workplace metrics from past years to the present. 

Conclusion 

An organization can develop predictive models for future behavior, improvements, and risks using workforce analytics to gain greater insight into historical employee trends. Identifying ways to automate routine tasks and eliminate unnecessary activities is easier by expanding the data set 

A better understanding of how teams collaborate and work together to achieve shared goals can also be obtained by comparing different departments. Regarding the workforce, drawing clear conclusions from complex datasets is especially important. Companies can improve employee satisfaction, experience, and retention by adopting an analytical framework, resulting in better, faster, and more data-driven decisions, leading to a fully optimized workforce.  

Workforce analytics can be very beneficial to organizations during times of change, such as pandemics, mergers, and acquisitions, thereby better understanding collaboration (or not) and making adjustments to ensure a smooth transition as quickly as possible, for example, integrating teams or returning to work after the pandemic. 

Developing an engaging workplace requires an understanding of workforce analytics. Employees today are required to connect with one another in new ways that were not possible in a traditional office environment due to today’s remote work cultures. Utilizing data to gain new insights is a concrete way to leverage technology while empowering employees through workforce analytics. 

If you’re interested in a career in HR Analytics, UNext Jigsaw is offering Certificate Program in People Analytics & Digital HR course to prepare for the job.