Workforce analytics help organizations better understand how their workforce is performing and progressing. While financial aspects of the organization are much easier to quantify, employee performance has historically been a challenging area to measure and report on. However, labor costs often make up the largest portion of organizational budgets, so being able to look at things like employee performance and progress are extremely important. That’s exactly what workforce analytics attempts to solve.
Workforce analytics software provides organizations with the tools and analytics needed to draw meaningful metrics that provide important insights into their workforce. These insights are important for strategic leaders to have, especially as their organization continues to grow, evolve, and become more complex.
What Are Workforce Analytics
Workforce analytics covers a wide range of metrics for many different aspects of the employee lifecycle. It can encompass metrics related to recruiting, employee performance, retention, and more. Whether you’re collecting it or not, there is plenty of data about your workforce being generated. Collecting this data and organizing it into meaningful numbers is what workforce analytics works to achieve. It can help organizational leaders gain a better understanding of their operations and make strategic decisions to identify inefficiencies and proactively make improvements.
Workforce Analytics Examples and Applications
There are numerous ways in which workforce analytics can be applied at your organization, and each organization likely has unique use cases based on their specific operations and infrastructure. The flexibility of workforce analytics can open up new opportunities to see your organization in a new light or make comparisons that weren’t possible before.
Let’s take a look at some common examples of how workforce analytics can be applied in real-life scenarios for health and human services organizations.
Recruiting
Recruiting is a top priority among health and human services executives, and this industry often struggles with higher-than-average turnover rates and difficulty finding applicants with the required credentials to fill a position. Workforce analytics can give us insights such as time to hire, number of applicants to fill a position, offer acceptance rate, and more.
This information can then be used to estimate the cost and time associated with filling an open position and help plan for the future. Higher costs and more time, or data showing increases in these areas over time, can indicate that some improvements may be needed for your recruiting strategy.
Employee Performance
Off the top of your head, can you name the top performers on your team? At a smaller organization, you may be able to answer this fairly easily and on a personal level. But as organizations increase in headcount and complexity, having some data behind employee performance can help. Workforce analytics can provide important insight into KPIs and other goal tracking metrics.
Retention
Going hand in hand in recruiting, once you have the right person in the right role, ideally you want to keep them there. Has your retention rate (or turnover rate) gone up or down over the last quarter or two? If turnover has started increasing, knowing about it sooner rather than later can help. It might be time to run a feedback survey to see what employees want and need, and use that information to help with your retention efforts. It may be that the simplest change can make a big difference, but
Benefits of HR metrics
Workforce analytics is especially important for HR leaders, as this department is most focused on the people analytics and HR metrics for the organization. Workforce analytics enables HR leaders to form a solid understanding of how the organization is doing and what direction it’s headed in. This information translates to identifying workforce challenges and creating solutions that will keep your workforce happy, engaged, and productive at work.
Workforce Analytics Software
Imagine calculating just a handful of the workforce metrics we’ve explored by hand. The complexity and time required to aggregate data and make those calculations would be astronomical. And by the time you had the numbers drawn up to start looking for insights, your data would already be outdated. Even with a dedicated data scientist on board, getting the right information to the right people poses yet another challenge. Finance may want information on the efficiency of a specific program, while HR may be wanting to know how to improve the employee experience. Then, over in Operations, we may see the need for how effective a newly implemented process has been.
In order to get the right information at the right time in front of the right people, you need the right workforce analytics software. This is software specifically designed to automatically collect all of the workforce data, provide a means for running reports to pull up the specific data you need, and presenting it in a way that’s easy to understand for all of us non-data scientists out there. Workforce analytics software enables leaders from each department of the organization to pull up the specific information they need, as needed, without having to sit down with an expert just to understand what they’re looking at.
Where to Find Workforce Analytics Software
Where’s the best place to find workforce analytics software? While you may be able to find standalone software packages out there solely dedicated to workforce analytics, a better option may be to look at your human capital management system. Your HR and Payroll system is already where a lot of “people data” is naturally stored, so it makes sense that this is where you want your workforce analytics to live as well. A smartly designed HR and Payroll software solution will have workforce analytics built in, working seamlessly as part of the system to draw the data you need from a single source of truth. And, since it’s built in, there’s no risk of missing or misreading data points, and there’s no need for redundant data entry into a separate system either.
Workforce Analytics from DATIS
DATIS provides a fully unified HR and Payroll solution tailored to the unique needs of health and human services organizations. And – you guessed it – this solution encompasses all of your workforce analytics needs as well.
The business intelligence feature of the DATIS solution enables you to combine data from multiple sources and run reports that pull up the information you need, whether you’re looking for the bird’s-eye-view big picture analytics or the drill-down reporting to dig into the details. The reporting capabilities of our software include easy-to-read dashboards that quickly show you organizational trends like turnover and recruiting efficiency. You can also view total compensation reports, compare budgeted versus actual costs, and run all types of custom reports with ease. And, because our HR and Payroll system is fully unified, all of your data is already in one place to offer a single source of truth for your organization.
As a built-in feature of our unified solution, our workforce analytics software is always available and accessible to our clients, no matter how far back into the data you wish to go. Our data systems also integrate seamlessly with your EHR and General Ledger for even more robust reporting options to provide you with the holistic solution you need for your organization.
If you’d like to learn more about our HR and Payroll software solution, including our built-in workforce analytics features, contact today to see our solution in action during a brief demo.
