Do you ever feel like you’re talking to a brick wall? Or just struggling to get a word in edgeways? You could have all the boardroom bravado you want, but getting senior leaders to take note is always a challenge – and when it comes to telling line managers what they need to know, there’s always the risk they’ll tell you where to go…
If you want people to listen, you need a voice. And for HR professionals, the key is people analytics. Sounds like a complicated answer to a complicated question but trust us – it’s simpler than you think.
Why should HR have a voice?
We’re preaching to the choir here, but HR? You matter. Keeping the wheels turning and the engine fuelled, you are the multifaceted, multi-hatted super-department that keeps the organisation going. You know that, but does everyone else?
HR has a bad reputation – too admin-obsessed, too bossy, too critical – but it doesn’t have to be that way. Because human resources work across the organisation, it has a unique perspective. One that’s focused on people.
The bottom line? Your workforce is the biggest influencing factor on your bottom line. Hire well, retain talent, engage employees, and develop skills, and organisational success will follow. We know you’ve got a lot to say about that – you just need people analytics to give you a voice.
Everything you need to know about people analytics
What is people analytics?
People analytics is the process of analysing data about your employees, with the aim of answering business-critical questions.
What does people analytics involve?
- Collating employee data: including characteristics like gender and age, years of service, department and number of absences
- Analysing employee data: including looking for trends and patterns in similar groups of employees – for example, the attrition rate of women in sales
- Interpreting employee data: including looking for reasons behind any identified HR trends, using additional sources like feedback data
What about predictive analytics in HR?
Predictive analytics in HR allows you to proactively identify trends, like attrition risks in certain departments. It’s basically predicting the future, using numbers. Now that’ll make your senior management sit up and pay attention!
Isn’t people analytics time-consuming and confusing?
Here are some of the barriers you might face, when it comes to people analytics:
- Skills gap: not every HR professional has a background in data analytics – in fact, it’s the biggest skills gap at all levels
- Lack of time: with 101 responsibilities, from career development to contracts, spending hours in spreadsheets isn’t always possible
- Higher priorities: if your leadership team don’t see you as a strategic player, they’ll want you to use your time differently
There is another way. Qlearsite makes people analytics easy. You integrate your HRIS (in a matter of minutes!), and our platform handles the data for you. It’s fast, giving you hours and hours back, and simple, so you can always provide business-critical answers your leadership team wants.
Try Qlearsite: it’s fast, simple, and built for small businesses
Will leaders get behind data-driven HR?
Facts and figures can be dry, but everything in business comes down to the numbers. People analytics (also known as workforce analytics) lets you uncover narratives – like our imagined attrition problem for women in the sales department – and arm you with evidential stats.
Prove the ROI of doing (or not doing!) something, and you’ve won the argument. And when those data-driven decisions pay off, there’ll be less pushback to begin with.
How can I get started?
HR data analysis can be done manually, sure. But don’t you have enough on your plate? We’ve built an affordable, easy-to-use platform to give you the answers you need. Getting started is as simple as 1, 2, 3:
- Sign up to Qlearsite’s People Analytics Platform
- Connect your HRIS
- Let the platform show you what it can do