HR analytics, also known as people analytics, involves collecting talent data and applying it to analyses that can shape business outcomes. You can also think of it as the combination of data analytics and human resources. The key here is that the HR team needs to have some knowledge of the data process, but the data team also needs to understand the concepts and goals of the human resources department.
In this article, we will introduce the concept of people analytics and how HR and data professionals can leverage their knowledge and skills to make data-driven decisions.
The following list presents three easy ways to get started with HR analytics:
1. Understand how analytics can be used in HR
Before we dive into how you can get started with HR analytics, it’s critical to understand some of the use cases. If you create an analytics project without a clear goal or question to answer, you are set up to fail. Luckily, we’ve compiled some examples of easy-to-implement HR analytics projects.
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Relate Employee Engagement to Retention Efforts
The relationship between employee engagement and employee satisfaction is often curvilinear, meaning that there’s a balance between too little and too much engagement. However, something that can be unique to a company is how these two factors influence employee retention efforts.
By analyzing data related to employee satisfaction, engagement, and attrition, HR professionals can retain their top talent, prevent high rates of turnover, or even predict which employees will quit and intervene before that happens.
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Optimize Your Staffing Needs
When a company is over or understaffed this can lead to wasted resources or lack of productivity. What if your HR department could determine the right number of employees to work at specific times and on the right teams? This is possible by analyzing the data. Simple analyses such as a linear regression can help understand the optimal number of employees based on the team’s business outcomes, and so much more.
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Test the Effectiveness of Training Programs
When developing onboarding training programs, reviewing the historical data and analyzing outcomes is the key to making improvements. For instance, if your company is testing out a new training program for sales associates, you might want to run an A/B test, with one group receiving the old training and the other group receiving the new training.
By comparing the short and long-term outcomes for those employees, the HR team can make more data-driven decisions related to which training program works best, is most efficient, or most cost-effective.
2. Identify which skills are needed for HR analytics
As an HR professional, you may have experience with specific software for reporting. One common example is Ceridian Dayforce, which can help with workforce management, payroll, talent intelligence, and more. The power of leveraging multiple data sources to provide deeper insights related to HR analytics is invaluable to becoming a data-driven organization.
That being said, all different skillsets can be beneficial for getting started with HR analytics, including any or all of the following:
- Knowledge of HCM software, such as Ceridian Dayforce
- Data warehousing for storing data in a central data cloud
- SQL for querying your data and getting it in the format you need for an analysis
- The importance of using API’s to get access to source system data
- Critical thinking, to understand how your findings can influence business decisions (putting it all together)
The important thing to note is that depending on your HR analytics project, you may need specific skills to succeed. That is why the first step is to identify your use case, the scope of your project, and the underlying goal.
3. Determine if your HR analytics project requires coding
If an HR analytics project requires coding (java, python, SQL, C#, etc.) then things can start to get more difficult for those who are more on the HR side of things. Typically, an HR department will have to coordinate with their IT department (developers and analysts) to write the code to pull their data from the software they use and drop it into a visualization tool.
Luckily, DataLakeHouse offers a no-code solution for those who need to get started with HR analytics without the IT department.
Rather than hardcoding your scripts and relying on developers for every task for your HR analytics projects, DataLakeHouse gives you the chance to explore and analyze data with a point-and-click interface. No need for the HR team to learn development skills (python, java, etc).
Now, this doesn’t eliminate the use of coding at all, but rather, gives those with no coding experience the chance to dive into the data and gather insights even if they don’t have a high level of technical knowledge.
Why DataLakeHouse
If you have a development team that is good at what they do, then why do you need the HR professionals to do the same job? The short answer is that it’s about accessibility. If the HR team wants to understand their data, they need to be able to look at the raw and transformed data themselves.
Think about it – if the nontechnical team can explore their data at a similar level as those with extensive coding knowledge, it allows the teams to work together, rather than working in silos. This is the key to getting started with people analytics and completing your first successful analytics project. If you’re ready to take the next step towards leveraging HR analytics for your business, set up a demo with DataLakeHouse to better understand how we can help you achieve your goals.
