How to Make the Most of Workforce Analytics
It’s a widespread opinion that departments across businesses can benefit the most from workforce analytics, gathering comprehensive data to evaluate employee performance, and talent management and determine retention rates. The truth is that numerous departments in your company besides HR can use workforce analytics data to measure and boost employees’ productivity and engagement and enhance collaboration across teams.
More importantly, employees can analyze data gathered via advanced workforce analytics apps, like Insightful to identify their robust sides and weaknesses and improve their time management.
Here you’ll see how to make the most of efficient workforce analytics in HR and beyond to take your business and employee performance management to the next level.
Workforce Analytics in HR
HR experts usually focus on employee retention performance and recruitment when using workforce analytics in the decision-making process. The most frequent questions they’re trying to answer are:
- Are we keeping top performers?
- What are top performers’ prominent traits?
- How effective are training sessions?
- How to identify areas suitable for labor costs?
And workforce analytics can help you make well-informed decisions and take actionable steps in the following HR aspects.
Employee retention – In a time of Great Resignation and a looming global recession, your retention rates can make or break your business. With the workforce analytics gained via employee screen monitoring, you may see how effective your onboarding processes, training sessions, and business practices are. And you can determine the way these factors affect employee retention rates. This will help you identify potential issues you need to address to keep your employees happy and satisfied with the workplace and prevent higher turnover rates.
Identifying top performers – Besides measuring and analyzing employee productivity, HR experts can use invaluable insights from worker monitoring data to learn the prominent traits and practices of overachievers so that they can replicate these behaviors in the rest of the employees.
Training and professional development – Workforce analytics data can be of great help in measuring the effectiveness of your training sessions and employee professional development.
If you want to attract and retain top talent in the tight market make sure to offer continuous training and learning opportunities where your employees can upgrade their skills and overcome potential roadblocks to their success and professional development. You can compare the workforce monitoring data before and after specific training to measure its effectiveness and identify its strong sides and areas for improvement.
Identifying habitual absenteeism – Besides justified reasons for employees’ skipping work, like paid time off or sick leave, there’s also habitual absenteeism that shows that employee is disengaged from their work and may consider leaving your company. This behavior can seriously disrupt your team workflow, impose missed deadlines and ruin your productivity and brand reputation.
You can avoid this worst-case scenario by deploying workforce analytics software to keep track of your employees’ time and attendance and help you take effective action against those who deliberately miss showing up for work long-term.
The Evolution of Workforce Analytics
Besides answering burning HR questions that can help you retain and further motivate top talent and cut specific labor costs when necessary, workforce analytics can help you focus on and improve employee performance and productivity. This aspect of workforce analytics was indispensable during the Covid pandemic when the majority of companies transferred their operations online, leading fully remote teams.
Because this detailed and objective information could show business leaders how employees use their work hours while out of sight.
Here’s how other teams besides HR can use workforce analytics data to keep your staff productive and connected while boosting cross-team collaboration.
Websites and Apps Usage Analysis
You can use workforce analytics to identify what apps and websites your employees use to complete their tasks and the average time spent on each. In this way, you’ll determine whether your employees use tools aligned with their roles and projects assigned to them.
You’ll also get a chance to see what apps they’re using efficiently compared to the tools they may struggle with judging from the amount of time spent on various apps.
This insightful information may help you identify workers in need of additional training and support.
You can also use this analysis to identify and reward overachievers that make the most of different apps and tools to get the job done.
Invaluable Productivity Insights
One of the gravest worries most managers had when transferring to a fully remote work model during the pandemic was how to make sure their employees stay highly productive away from their watchful eye.
Workforce analytics software came as an answer recording employees’ time spent at work and dividing it into productive, idle, and unproductive categories. This information helps you see how productive your team members are during the day. But you can drive numerous other conclusions from tracking productivity that can be indicative of overworking or even burnout.
For, example if some of your employees tend to work frequently overtime but still miss headlines, they may be overwhelmed with complex and vague tasks or may be distracted easily.
If you don’t want your employees to disengage or slip into burnout, use this information to take actionable steps and get them back on track preserving their health and performance rates.
Enhanced Collaboration and Time Management
You can use workforce analytics to determine whether your employees have and use all the tools necessary to complete their projects and see whether your tech stack needs to be refreshed. These tracking reports will tell you what tools may have become obsolete, so you can replace them with more up-to-date versions. Also, your employees can help you discover some tech solutions that you’ve never used before that can help your employees work faster and more efficiently.
Meetings are an important part of every collaboration but lengthy and ineffective meetings can be significant time wasters that can affect employees’ focus and overall performance. Worker monitoring will show you the time your employees spend on various meetings instead of working on critical tasks. You can use these reports to limit the number of meetings per week and the time spent on them.
Final Words
As you can see many departments and teams in your company can benefit from workforce analytics. Data has become a powerful ally that can make take your business to the next level if used intelligently.
Now that you know how multifunctional data analytics can be it’s time to take actionable steps and include workforce analytics software to optimize your business processes and boost productivity.