People Analytics Provides Important Business Insights

What is People Analytics?

According to Gartner, people analytics (also commonly known as HR analytics) is “the collection and application of talent data to improve critical talent and business outcomes. People analytics leaders enable HR leaders to develop data-driven insights to inform talent decisions, improve workforce processes and promote positive employee experience.”

So if you’re an HR professional, CPO/CHRO, CIO, CEO, or other business leader looking to better understand your workforce and predict, forecast, and plan for changes, then people analytics can transform how you manage your business.

People analytics help HR and business leaders navigate a direct course from flying blind to proactive human capital management with sophisticated insights, delivered easily and directly. It can help you predict workforce outcomes, prepare for trends, and put people insights to work by:

• Aligning recruiting and retention efforts by understanding where you are being successful and where the gaps are
• Examining emerging trends among key groups before they impact your business
• Benchmarking internal retention indicators against your industry or competitors to hire the best and keep them for longer
• Visualizing the health of your workforce to ensure business continuity and growth
• Accurately forecasting future scenarios and outcomes to start shaping the future, not just reacting to the past
• Better equipping your organization to recruit and then retain top talent through deep analytics and predictive modeling

Predictive People Analytics

Many HR teams have too much data and too little insight. Too often, data is unusable beyond surface-level metrics or unavailable to the people who need it most to solve real problems. That’s where predictive people analytics comes in.

According to Forbes, predictive analytics is when certain values or events can be identified and then changed in order to forecast what is likely a better future according to the user’s requirements.

The Predictive People Analytics platform from isolved, GTM’s human capital management partner, delivers easy access to:

• Better visibility and insights to make people decisions
• Easy-to-use mobile and web dashboards
• Predictions to assist with strategic planning
• Centralized metrics for one-stop action
• The ability to tie people data to financial data
• Conversational voice-activated virtual assistant

How Predictive People Analytics Works

There are really three parts to the analytics tool, each of which enables you to view and understand information about your employees and your business more easily than you can with home-grown tools or complex (and expensive) business information platforms.

The first, and simplest, is that it lets you quickly build dashboards (or just pick one we built for you) and immediately start to see things like salary, cost-to-hire employees, the diversity of a workforce, turnover, and so on. As long as you have that data in your HCM platform, then the analytic tool pulls it in, does the analysis for you, and then shows you simply and easily what you probably need to know (but couldn’t get to in the past). Of course, you can tailor what it shows and decide who gets to see it, but immediately after getting it up and running you’ll be better informed and have access to the above metrics (point-in-time measures) as well as many others.

It’s very easy to see how things are tracking over a year, or several years. Want to see how your average cost-to-hire is tracking? Click. Perhaps you’d like to see if the turnover of employees is getting better or worse? Click. There it is, charted for you.

This second level, the analytic level, lets you quickly spot things that a single, point-in-time metric might miss. Suppose you’re slowly losing your key employees and that trend is getting worse? Now you can see, and of course, do something about it.

Businesses of every size struggle to see the wood for the trees in HR data and the point of the analytic function of isolved Predictive People Analytics is to let you step back, see the trends, and plan for the future from the basis of knowledge and information, not gut-feel and guesswork.

Making it easy to get access to those analytics, and to see the trends over time is what really makes this kind of tool so powerful when it comes to making good decisions. Best yet, when you make a change, it lets you track the impact because now you can see if those trends change as time passes.

And here’s where isolved Predictive People Analytics gets really interesting. What if, rather than waiting several months to see the impact of changes, you could have the system tell you what’s likely to happen?

This is where the power of the artificial intelligence (AI) modeling feature in isolved Predictive People Analytics comes into play – to deliver on the “predictive” part of the name. The idea is simple (and thankfully so is using it). First, the system automatically looks at all your business data and identifies what traits and behaviors drive certain outcomes. In fact, it does this all the time, without you needing to tell it to.

The best example is employee turnover, a problem businesses of every size are struggling to understand and manage. The analytic tool learns, by examining your business and employee data, what things drive changes in employee retention – such as salary, training, remote working, distance of commute, and so on, depending on what information you have available.

What this means is that you can look at your employees, or a subset of employees, and see what factors drive changes in retention and how significant they are. This also means you’re operating from a position of knowledge and facts, and not speculation.

People Analytics Benefits Your Business

Most powerful of all, the platform lets your try “what-if” scenarios. What if you increase salary – does that change retention rates? What about more training? And so on. Each change can be easily visualized, and the outcomes are modeled right there on the screen.

This is where the transformative power of your data, collected over perhaps many years, and the capabilities of AI come together. A simple, easy-to-understand approach to modeling key business decisions, based on your data, your employees, and the outcomes you want to drive.

So at each step, from visualization of metrics to help you clearly understand your business today, through analytic charts to help you identify trends, all the way to AI-based predictive modeling, the simple, direct job for isolved Predictive People Analytics is to unlock the insight buried in the data you already have, and to do it fast, simply, and easily.

And predicting the positive impact of that is, well, easy too.

Remove the cost and expertise barriers to bring you sophisticated predictive people insights by automatically aggregating data and applying advanced AI-backed prediction models. Request a free quote to learn more and to see a demo.