Enterprise companies must make data-driven decisions to remain competitive; the depth of your data available determines the insights you can achieve and the actions you can take. The more comprehensive and holistic your data set, the more predictive and agile your decisions. But integrating, cleaning, anonymizing, and analyzing comprehensive work data at enterprise scale – while ensuring regulatory compliance – can be a massive undertaking
Data-driven enterprises are leveraging new solutions, and the most effective among them is the practice of people analytics. People analytics at the enterprise level can improve operational efficiency, increase employee engagement, and make managers and leaders more effective. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at people analytics and the benefits it can offer enterprise companies. Let’s dive in.
Before getting into people analytics, let's talk about traditional HR data analysis. HR analytics, which is a predecessor of sorts to people analytics, is focused on human resources-related data. HR analytics hones in on metrics like time to hire, training expenses, turnover rate, performance ratings for employees and more.
These metrics can be used by the HR department to optimize HR processes and outcomes. They can also be used to make larger decisions about enterprise operations. But, generally, HR analytics is focused inward, dealing with KPIs related to HR processes.
On the other hand, people analytics generates a more holistic, detailed view of how work is getting done, surfacing more insights and more actions to impact top-line KPIs from revenue to efficiency.
Traditional HR analytics can be useful, but modern enterprise companies should expand their view to include people analytics, leveraging more insight into their business.
People analytics and HR analytics are sometimes used interchangeably, but they describe two different things. HR analytics is focused on HR data to improve processes in the HR department. Meanwhile, people analytics data reveals a broader view of the company as a whole.
Properly implemented, people analytics pulls data from across your tech stack and across the org chart – from email and Slack to Office and Salesforce, from customer service to C-suite. This data is integrated and anonymized, enabling predictive analytics, insights, benchmarking and reporting.
Worklytics integrates more than 200 data points reflecting customer feedback, employee engagement, communication trends, training insights, management performance, work-life balance, employee life cycle and much more.
Integrating people analytics allows enterprise companies to take a more holistic view of both workforce and business operations. The key takeaway here is that people analytics is focused on improving processes and outcomes across your organization, rather than focusing solely on HR. People analytics paints a much more in-depth picture of your business, which is why it’s so valuable in the modern enterprise data analysis stack.
Now that we understand a little more about people analytics, let’s take a deeper dive into the benefits this strategy can offer enterprise companies.
Leveraging people analytics can help enterprises improve operational efficiency across every level of their organization. By taking an in-depth look at people analytics workforce data, you can find bottlenecks, areas where employees are underperformed, understaffed areas, management performance issues and much more. Using this data, leaders can make adjustments to better allocate resources and improve processes.
People analytics gives your enterprise the ability to create a more agile, responsive organizational structure. You can ultimately drive productivity and reduce costs by understanding where your resources should go and how you can align your workforce’s strengths with your overall business goals.
Company culture is something that is increasingly valued by quality employees who stay at companies for a long time. But, company culture is also hard to measure without the proper data analysis tools. With people analytics, you can better understand how employees are engaged with your company culture and make data-driven decisions to improve that culture.
People analytics can give you insight into the work-life balance of employees by analyzing after-work emails, time since vacation and other metrics. People analytics lets you measure employee collaboration by showing you data about the number of peers your employees have, frequency of contact with peers and their number of leadership connections. People analytics can also measure survey results, peer engagement and so much more. These are just a few examples of how you can get real, actionable insights into a company culture. Using this data, you can create targeted culture initiatives that genuinely resonate with your workforce. This promotes a culture that leads to a happier work environment that attracts and keeps top talent.
People analytics gives you in-depth insights into the nuances and intricacies of employee engagement data. By pulling data from a variety of sources, you can gain insight into communication trends, employee satisfaction, employee retention, career stagnation, work-life balance and other metrics that indicate how engaged your employees are with the company and the goals of the company. Using these insights, you can find specific areas for improvement like enhancing communication channels, giving employees better development opportunities, offering better benefits, changing work-life balance policies and more. You can find what matters to your employees and what excites them.
One example would be finding out that productivity is increased when employees have more work flexibility, such as hybrid work where they are allowed to work from home two days a week. If hybrid employees are more successful when working from home, you could consider adjusting the policy to give them even more flexibility to work from the office when they choose. This is just one way you could learn how your workforce operates and adjust your strategy to meet their needs using people analytics.
We touched on it when discussing company culture, but enterprise companies are continually facing the issue of retaining top talent. As an enterprise-level company, the needs of top talent may not always be recognized, leading to them leaving for other companies and a higher turnover rate overall.
People analytics allows you to see metrics like employee satisfaction, career progression data and more to understand where your high-potential individuals are and how you can nurture their growth within your company. This helps retention by showing employees that they are supported with career growth and opportunities while also fostering a culture of internal mobility. Analyzing trends in your employee turnover and retention can help you develop initiatives that prioritize talent and give them the resources and opportunities they need to stay on board and grow into even more significant contributors to company success.
Finally, modern people analytics software allows you to understand all of these valuable metrics without compromising the privacy and security of your employees and your business. Platforms like Worklytics can fully anonymize employee data and also adhere to GDPR and CCPA compliance to ensure you and your workforce are protected.
In addition to adhering to the legal requirements of big data, anonymizing employee metrics also helps build a trust-based relationship with your workforce. Trust should be built into the foundation of any people analytics strategy, as it shows that you respect the privacy and security of your employees. In short, a commitment to ethical data practices should be the new standard for any forward-thinking enterprise company.
While people analytics provide incredible opportunities, enterprises face important challenges when it comes to implementation. The ethical use of data is a top concern, as companies need to find a way to get these insights without invading employee privacy. Noninvasive data collection methods are necessary to overcome this obstacle and make employees feel like they aren’t being constantly surveilled.
Legal compliance also becomes a more significant challenge at the enterprise level, since the stringent regulations of GDPR and CCPA need to be considered. But, that doesn’t mean, ethical people analytics for enterprise-level companies is impossible. Instead, it simply means that better tools are needed that prioritize this sort of ethical data handling. That’s where platforms like Worklytics come in, which has privacy, anonymization, compliance and security built-in.
New, innovative tools like Worklytics are providing new opportunities for enterprise companies that want to harness the power of people analytics. Traditional methods of employee monitoring that require plug-ins or software that monitors laptop activity can feel invasive and make employees uncomfortable. Worklytics offers a much more nuanced approach to people analytics, analyzing productivity, engagement and other important metrics through nonintrusive data collection methods that prioritize employee privacy.
This is not only more comfortable for employees, but enterprise companies can also get critical insights into data that makes leaders more effective and workforces more efficient. This allows enterprise companies to support talent retention, foster internal mobility and reap all of the benefits of people analytics in a modern, compliance-friendly way.
Worklytics helps businesses of all sizes understand and enhance their operations and their people. Worklytics provides people analytics that generates actionable insights from real-time work data across your organization, without having to compromise employee privacy. Ready to learn more about how Worklytics can help your enterprise business? Book your demo today.
