Believe it or not we are in the world of Big Data and with this we can create wonders. Analytics has been applied everywhere possible and HR analytics may be new to us, but it was always there.
What does analytics do?
You may think analytics as waste of time, but really, they help us gain insights which can drive our decisions. You can’t always comprehend what is going on with just a blink of the eye or for that matter no amount of paper work on your employees can get you what you wanted.
Nevertheless, analytics changed the game for good. If we invest half the amount of time we spend on doing paper work, we will get richer insights in our progress. With AI and Big Data, there is no telling how it will all turn up – all we know is it will turn up good, the real variable is how much?
HR Analytics
In the HR world, there were always these metrics to measure the employee’s performance, cost per hire and other metrics too. The modern-day analytics can even predict the performance of a particular employee over a period of time and let you know when you should cut them off. That right there is the future of our analytics.
To make sure you are hiring the right person, the first thing we measure is qualifications and next experience. Well, you may not know what kind of talent you exactly to need to fill the position. May be an extremely talented person doing something ordinary and mundane may drop his/her motivation to do a better job. We don’t really know what happens once we hire the individual. Using HR analytics, we can get a mock profile of the person who would fill the position in a best way possible.
The success of the company cannot depend upon one single metric, we usually take more than one interrelated metrics to arrive at an informed decision. For example, a company hires an employee and he is overburdened, the result of which is bad quality of work. This is something a company can’t afford. Sometimes you may not have enough man power to distribute the work load fairly. Sometimes you need to make tough decisions and push your employees harder. However, there is a limit to everything, you need to know when you need to stop pushing and when you need an extra set of hands on the deck.
By just looking at number of hours an employee worked you can’t take an informed decision. Often what you think best may not be the right option. Analytics on the other hand, they monitor everything, from number hours, throughput of each employee, quality of work based on customer reviews and even investment on each employee and how much is being well spent. This kind of comprehensive analysis of the situation can get you better results. That is why we prefer HR analytics.
HR Analytics tools
We don’t have a comprehensive HR analytics tool like we do in Social Analytics. However, most of the companies who use HR analytics make their own HR dashboard. Using statistically rich languages like R and Python, developing it is not really a big deal.
A commercial HR dashboard would be a better option and it is tad-bit bothering that we don’t have one. Nevertheless, we have many HR analytics tools, which can help HR managers recruit, analyse, and get a grasp of the investment on the workforce. We have individual platform for all of these functions. Like, Scout Exchange, Mirror, HireView, Scaba and many more of that sort.
Scout Exchange is one of the many HR analytics tools that is out there in the market. Though none of these tools provide a concise report on everything there is to know, they still hold good value in the HR community.
Problems solved by having HR analytics
- Employee churn detection. This is one of the major problems in any organisation. If you lose the man power faster than you can refill it, then you are in a very deep hole.
- Performance Analysis. Gives a fair view of who is performing and who is not.
- Helps to group employees with similar metrics. Team work is the essence of any success story. To build successful teams you need appropriate data which can isolate the individuals and help you put together a better performing team for greater throughput.
If your company has not adopted HR analytics yet, this is high time that you start working on it.