What Are People Analytics Tools, And How Do They Work?

What Are People Analytics Tools?

People analytics tools help to gather and analyze HR data in a more effective and streamlined way. They provide the ability to explore correlation and causation and make data-driven decisions about how to adjust or progress. People analytics data might include workforce composition, cost per hire, employee engagement, staff turnover rate, gender pay equity, and diversity.

Leadership has been making people decisions based on gut feeling for decades. Quality insights gathered and visualized by people analytics platforms can help to transform HR best practices, business interactions, and the HR-employee relationship.

There are tools suitable for organizations of all different sizes, from small start-ups to larger corporations with vast numbers of employees.

What Are The Key Benefits Of People Analytics Tools?

• The potential to increase the effectiveness of your recruitment and talent acquisition process – reducing time to hire, and cost and ensuring suitability for the role, increasing quality of hire.

• Better performance management across your business, due to the people's insight from tracked performance metrics (such as measuring productivity through performance goals).

• Monitoring hiring diversity – and alerting you to the necessity of action - to ensure a more inclusive, diverse, and innovative workplace.

• Productivity benefits, as employees feel that the business is actively investing in its people and taking action to create a better work environment through flexible and adaptive approaches and policies.

• Improved workforce planning, lowering attrition and ensuring you are proactively recruiting to support company growth.

• Increased revenue through more streamlined, informed, and targeted HR processes.

How Do People Analytics Tools Work?

People analytics tools track, analyse, and visualize employee data through a user-friendly interface.

The best tools provide you with an HR dashboard that is both insightful and predictive. Whilst the insights provided by descriptive analytics unlock the current business landscape, predictive platforms help you to predict future trends.

Tools with prescriptive analytics capabilities go a step further, using the insights of both descriptive and predictive analytics to recommend options or courses of action.

There is a wide range of tools on offer, so research is recommended to find the tool that best suits your needs. They vary in terms of service offering, interface, data visualisation, and pricing.

When selecting a platform (or indeed packages or plans within a platform), consider its data capabilities, visualisation style and reporting, modelling abilities, tracking capabilities and methods, and the data security provided.

What Are Some of the Platforms Available?

Some examples of people analytics tools include:

1. OrgVue

OrgVue builds organizational design into its people analytics software. There are three packages available: 'Spectrum', which allows you to view your organization in its entirety; 'Position & Roles', which enables a greater understanding of demand and supply for roles, along with current and future business costs; and the 'People' plan, which - amongst other features - allows you to visualize and analyse your organizational structure (reporting packs can also be created to share with stakeholders). Pricing information is available once a demo has been booked.

2. Visier People

Visier People has a broad service offering and is aimed at mid-market and enterprise clients. It is a comprehensive tool that aims to power data-driven decision-making by providing insight across a vast range of organizational metrics.

It allows you to staff HR to meet your business needs, plan your future workforce across departments, manage your recruitment pipeline, reduce high-performer exit rates, measures the impact training has on productivity, manages and reduce overtime and achieve your diversity goals. Again, pricing is available once a demo has been booked.

3. Lattice

As well as tracking your people analytics, allowing for better performance management, employee monitoring and planning for growth & development, Lattice also enables individual employees to view their profiles and see how they are contributing to the organization as a whole.

The platform, which is best suited to medium to large enterprises, has three analytics plans: ‘Performance', ‘Performance & Engagement', and ‘Enterprise'. Price is calculated based on the size and requirements of the company.

4. Sisense

Sisense builds custom analytic experiences suitable for assisting a wide range of organizations to leverage their competitive advantage. It has two platforms. The first, Sisense Fusion Analytics, merges business data and strategy. It also allows you to augment your insights using predictive analytics, AI, and machine learning.

The second option is Sisense Fusion Embed which, as suggested by its name, is an embedded analytics platform. It enables you to fuse analytics with any ecosystem and to scale securely.

5. Wisnio

Wisnio is a talent analytics tool that helps team leaders evaluate how each candidate would complement their team and impact the culture of the organization.

The platform assesses the values, competencies, and behaviors that impact team performance. Based on that insight, the Wisnio hiring toolkit helps to define the characteristics you should look for in your next hires to complement the team and strengthen your culture.

Finally, you can use Wisnio for onboarding and team development to shape an environment where everyone can perform at their best.

What People Analytics Should You Measure?

Analytics that may be useful to track, measure, and analyse using people analytics tools include:

• Cost per hire – The overall cost of hiring new talent into a vacant or new position within your organization.

• Time to hire – The time taken to hire an individual suitable for a role, from job posting to candidate acceptance of a job offer.

• Employee engagement/job satisfaction – It is important to monitor employee satisfaction and levels of engagement to ensure your company processes and culture are creating a productive and positive working environment. Data on satisfaction can help you to ensure employees are being given the right responsibilities, are supported correctly, and are receiving adequate opportunities to develop.

• Employee turnover – Your rate of staff turnover. A high turnover, particularly among employees who have been in the position for under a year, can indicate problems within your hiring process, work environment, or company culture.

• Employee tenure – The length of time employees are remaining at the company. A low average employee tenure can indicate employee dissatisfaction or lack of progression and/or learning and development opportunities.

• Absence rate – Tracking your absence rate allows you to keep tabs on the cost of sick days to your business. Trends can also indicate employee dissatisfaction.

• Annual leave – Gathering data on annual leave allows you to see which employees are taking their holiday and who may need encouragement to take a well-earned break. It also allows you to see how to leave impacts productivity.

• Pay – Tracking pay packages allows you to see how pay is structured across your organization and ensure it aligns according to experience and responsibility. It also enables you to monitor your gender pay gap, so you can actively seek to reduce it. To retain talent, pay across all organizational levels should be benchmarked against other businesses of a similar size and function within your sector.

• Diversity – A diverse workplace leads to greater creativity and innovation. Tracking your diversity metrics is key to ensuring your business is improving its diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, social background, educational background, and skills sets.

• Performance goals – It is beneficial to track the performance goals met by employees, as this gives insight into whether the goals being set are realistic and/or whether further employee support or targeted training and development is needed.

How Do You Implement People Analytics?

To successfully implement people analytics within your HR department, consider the following steps:

• Identify the data that matters to you - Set KPIs that match your business goals. Consider your workplace and the HR metrics that are of the highest priority to your success – whether tracking employee turnover or ensuring an increase in hiring diversity.

• Explore the analytics platforms available - Research people analytics tools and platforms, trialing and experimenting with different products. The tools allow you to book demos, so you can test out the software and get a sense of how well it would serve your business needs.

• Create an action plan - Form a plan outlining the data you will collect, your business goals, and how you will use the data to inform operations to reach them. Having an outline of direction and action options helps keep focus within your HR department, and allows stakeholders to have the foresight, and time to understand, any future changes to working practice.

• Ensure legal compliance - When gathering and storing data, it is crucial to maintain compliance and have confidence in your data security – so the risk of data exposure is reduced.

• Review the data - Analytics platforms need to be actively and regularly engaged with to be beneficial. View, analyze and consider the implications of the data you have collected.

• Sense check the information - While collected and aggregated automatically via your chosen digital platform, people analytics data still needs minds to turn the data into productive action. You will need to assess the data quality, approach it within the context and critically decide how it should inform action.

• Take informed, data-driven action - Once you have gained the insights from your data, initiate the relevant action to improve your talent acquisition process, performance management, employee turnover, workforce planning, and/or learning and development provisions. Your people analytics should not be viewed in isolation but be used to inform wider strategy.