Understanding the importance of workforce analytics powering Business Growth.

Imagine, you are head of a department in your company. It is obvious that the department has other members too of various talents and capabilities. So how would you assign them job roles and responsibilities that match with their talents and abilities? How do you identify the problem areas, monitor employee performance, handle operations, find out the best performing individuals and overachievers? What methods would you use to connect with your peers? What are the steps you shall take to ensure employee retention and job satisfaction? How would you know if the deadlines are met? What are the brand objectives? How can the company show that it cares for its employees, especially during COVID-19 pandemic times? How will you deal and manage all these things?

The good news is that analytics can be now be used to manage people. This fits perfectly with companies that consider their employees as their best resource even when they are equipped with state-of-the-art technologies. Workforce analytics can help leaders and authorities to make informed data-based decisions at a quicker pace than relying on mere intuitions. If the pandemic has highlighted anything, it is how important are employees' healthcare both physically and mentally, along with an emphasis on their safety and engagement. This has proved an opportunity for the HR managers to showcase that they are concerned about the well-being of the employees and take measures to ensure continuity of business activities. This is important for the companies, too, as a healthy employee who can communicate effectively with his peers, subordinates, and superiors can contribute to business success in the long run.

Surprisingly, people believe that workforce analytics can be performed only if the data amassed is perfect. Also, many organizations focus on data instead of the problem source in business. Leaders must realize that the data they require has a higher likelihood to be present already. They must prioritize identifying the problem points and brand objectives before hiring an expert, i.e., data analyst and data scientist, to deal with the issues or design a model that does. For this, leaders need to connect with the strategy teams too. Apart from that, they can conduct surveys (large organization) or group meetings (small scale organizations) periodically to discover the potential areas of improvement. Besides, they can use dashboards to visualize the data insights and monitor data quality regularly.  It is also equally vital to note the participation rates as it could signal overload if participation decreases. The aforementioned things are needed to maintain engagement by understanding employee needs and satisfaction levels, even in the COVID-19 lockdown periods.

Workforce analytics will also help in determining and fixing compensation rates for employees who are over-performing but have not yet been acknowledged. It can be used to establish performance benchmarks for the employees, and track the same to measure their future potential so that support can be provided. In case, training and skill gaps are found, training sessions can be organized. At the same time, high-performing employees can be mapped as per the requirements and performance specifications of other roles in order to facilitate succession planning. Analytics can further help to scan for future organizational needs so that recruitment will satisfy talent requirements. In addition, it is also resourceful in locating areas where efficiency can be improved with automation, which can boost employee satisfaction too. In gist, workforce analytics goes a long way as an instrumental tool that can lead a company to better organizational success, stakeholder and employee management, and retention with the ability to empower a leader to make an informed decision that benefits everyone.