Talent is an asset of the utmost importance for businesses today. In order to keep going towards their goals, competing efficiently, and growing, companies have to find and retain professional employees. Thus, no wonder, that businesses seek to boost recruitment with employee data from alternative sources and utilize all other means at their disposal to get the best talent out there. But once you have hired a great fit for the position, it is as important, if not more, to retain them. This is where employee engagement analytics can help.
Understanding employee engagement
Employee engagement analytics can best be described as a data-driven approach to measuring what motivates employee retention, satisfaction, and initiative in the business environment. This field covers everything employee-related from HR employee data management to constant surveying of workplace satisfaction, which makes it extremely worthy of any HR manager’s attention.
The main question that employee engagement analytics tries to answer is, quite naturally, what factors make employees happier and more engaged with their work. This is not to be taken as simply referring to workplace satisfaction, as it is only one part of it. Being satisfied is one thing while being actually actively engaged with work is a whole next level. The latter means showing initiative and keenly learning more about the job you are doing.
Thus, HR managers employ engagement analytics to figure out how to reach this level of engagement on as grand a scale as possible. Naturally, to get to such insights, one needs to analyze loads and loads of data. This requires top-notch employee data management by the HR department, as well as their ability to analyze this information and derive insights. Therefore, for HR, employee data management and analysis should become the top priority.
In short, employee engagement analytics refers to all the data related to employment and the employee perception of their work, combined with the tools to analyze this information. As such, it is one of the most important aspects of HR today.
Benefits of employee engagement analytics
The many advantages of utilizing data analytics to increase retention rates and employee engagement can be summed up into a few main categories. When HR employee data management tasks are completed efficiently, these benefits are sure to manifest. Here are the main groups of such beneficial aspects of data analytics in HR.
1. Increased employee retention.
The first group of benefits is the most obvious as it relates to employee retention. Data analytics help to bring out insights into what drives the employees in their work environment. This allows answering their needs better, thus lowering the turnover rates. And with lower turnover, more resources can be dedicated to improving the skill set of existing workers and building strong relationships in the team. Additionally, it helps to prevent losing the workforce during important business periods and stagnating due to a lack of hands on the crucial tasks.
2. Better motivational practices.
Answering the key employee engagement questions through analytics will also point in the right direction when working on motivational strategies. Data analytics might reveal that previous practices that the organization deployed to motivate the workers had little to do with their actual engagement. New methods will emerge as employee work satisfaction and engagement is understood better.
3. Improved HR relationship with the workers.
The proper usage of analytics also raises the status of the HR department in the view of other teams. When in control of HR employee data management tasks, HR managers are able to actually improve the working conditions for others, recognize the most engaged teams and offer proper rewards to them. This leads to HR’s recognition as a department that does its work professionally and is up-to-date with the latest business trends. Everyone from C-level executives to employees of every department will appreciate the importance of an HR department redefined to fit the modern business needs.
4. Enhanced quality of onboarding practices.
One can hardly expect to have an engaged employee when onboarding is deficient. In fact, bad onboarding at least in some industries is the easiest way to lose talent on day one. However, proper engagement analytics can show what is lacking in the current onboarding strategy in the organization. Additionally, learning from both employee experience and the practice of other firms will show ways to improve it. This leads not only to retaining new employees but to turning them into truly engaged and valuable talent, completely on board with the goals of the business.
These are of course just a few benefits of engagement analytics. Clearly, the general idea is that engagement analytics would not be around if it did not improve employee engagement. And higher engagement rates mean not only lower turnover rates but simply better business results.
How to do it right
The crucial role that engagement analytics play in modern HR employee data management and retention improvement is hard to overstate. When done right it can work miracles for business profitability. But what does it mean to do it right? Well, here are some basic tenets of proper employee engagement analytics.
Firstly, the variety and quality of data are the keys to successful analytics. Make sure that you are not basing your insights on only a few data points, but rather gathering various types of employment data. This should include the following.
- Poll data regarding workers’ satisfaction and motivation within the organization. This is a no-brainer – naturally, to understand your employees better, you need to ask them how they feel.
- Anonymous employer review data from other organizations. Only looking at yourself will not help without a frame of reference. Thus, you need to look at what employees say about their situation in other firms. You can get such information from third-party data providers.
- Online job posting data. This will allow you to see how the most popular positions are presented and what drives the talent to seek to fill them.
- General statistical and historical data about employment rates, trends, and talent pool composition. All such information relating to employment will help to understand the talent market better, leading to better HR decisions.
Data Management
There is virtually no limit to the data types that can be used for engagement analytics. Both traditional and alternative data sources that provide insights into employee engagement should be utilized when available.
Another important feature of proper engagement analytics is high-quality HR employee data management. Make sure that basic rules of management are well-established, and everyone is aware of what data needs to be collected and how it should be treated. Thus, some initial choices will have to be made and the objectives of analysis established, to make sure that the questions being answered are really the ones you set out to answer.
Finally, here is where various analytical and data management tools come in. There are many AI-based tools that can help you filter through the data you have to find what you need and move it where it is supposed to be. Data analysis is moving forward as fast as any other science currently being developed, thus new tools for analysis also keep showing up. Be sure to check out what technological solutions are out there and available to help with your tasks.
These are the main things you need to know when starting on your own employee engagement analytics. A lot more will come to be learned once you embark on this journey.
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