Drive Positive Change Within Your Organization With Employee Data
Though it’s often neglected until it’s time for the annual performance reports, employee data is one of the most critical business assets. It’s a goldmine of information that can help you improve processes, boost productivity, and outperform your competitors.
The key, however, is perfecting your data collection processes and learning how to put your insights to good use.
Take a look below to find out how your HR teams can use employee data to drive your success.
What exactly is employee data?
There are two main types of employee data – internal and external. Internal data is the information collected by the HR data analytics software throughout the employees’ lifecycle with the company. It includes everything from employees’ personal information such as name and address to their recruitment records, professional and educational background, performance reports, attendance information, management issues, and exit interview data.
As its name suggests, external data is the information collected from third parties. Public employee data can come from various sources, including job boards, forums, social media platforms, and the like. Instead of giving insights into your own company’s workforce, it gives you a bigger picture of employment trends, competitor hiring strategies, and employee expectations.
External data often includes employee demographics, competitor hiring criteria, talent gaps, workforce saturation, and more.
Combined, internal and external employee data offer unique insights that can help create a productive work environment that boosts your overall performance.
Top ways to use employee data
Whether external or internal (or both), employee data provides valuable insights that can be put to excellent use. Take a look at just some of the main ways HR departments can use employee data.
Enhance recruitment
Relying on data, you won’t have to make gut-based and often biased recruiting decisions, especially when you feed employee data into your HR tools and solutions. You’ll have clear insight into your candidates’ skills, experiences, strengths, weaknesses, and more – the only information you need to make data-based recruitment decisions.
Moreover, you’ll have a chance to do a comparative analysis between your current employees and their performance stats and your prospective candidates. It will help you predict how good a fit a job candidate is for your company culture and better understand the type of candidate to look for.
Improve onboarding
Needless to say, enhanced recruitment often leads to improved onboarding experiences. After all, employee data will tell you whether a candidate is suitable for the vacant position in your company or not. If they are, they’ll find it much easier to adapt to your work environment and reach productivity faster.
However, making the right hire isn’t the only way that employee data improves onboarding. You can also use the data to map the candidates’ skills and identify training needs, ensuring that the training focuses on the skills they’re lacking, not on the ones they’ve already mastered. Additionally, data can help you create a more productive buddy system that connects employees not solely based on skills but also on personal interests and hobbies. It will help new recruits build relationships with their coworkers and become a part of your company culture faster.
Retain talent
As previously mentioned, employee data gives you a bigger picture of employment trends – critical information needed for improving retention rates.
When you’re collecting external data, you’ll gain insights into what your competitors are doing – the rates they’re offering, the skills they’re seeking, their benefits, and their incentives. Just like you can easily find such information on your competitors, so can your employees.
If your current employees notice that your competition offers more appealing conditions, they’ll have little reason to stay with your organization. Therefore, to retain talent, you’ll need to use external data to find out what makes other companies so appealing, then make the necessary changes within your workplace.
It goes without saying that improving the workplace conditions for your current employees and reducing your turnover rates also helps you attract top talent, creating a win-win scenario for everyone involved.
Assess turnover causes
Detailed employee data can be indispensable for assessing turnover causes when employees decide to leave voluntarily. Exit interviews provide plenty of information on what a team member was unsatisfied with, why they chose to leave, or what could’ve been done to make them stay. However, exit interviews are rarely as honest and straightforward as they should be.
Therefore, you’ll need comprehensive employee data to determine the actual causes. You can break down attrition rates across teams and departments, conduct additional interviews with teammates, and more.
Additionally, you can use employee data from those who have left your organization to identify trends and predict future resignees.
Final thoughts
Enhancing recruitment, improving onboarding, retaining talent, and assessing turnover causes are just some of the top uses of internal and external employee data. By tracking, collecting, and analyzing employee data, your HR teams will have the opportunity to drive powerful insights that can help you ensure success and improve performance. So, while it’s always beneficial for annual performance reports, remember to put your employee data to good use in other ways as well.
