An Explosion in People Analytics

Are you feeling the need to include people analytics in your business? You’re not alone. In fact, a recent survey conducted by SHRM states 78 percent of companies consider incorporating people analytics to be an urgent need. Data-driven decisions have always been the standard in business—and thanks to big data are now more prevalent—but HR departments have relied more on intuition to evaluate talent. The explosion in people analytics is changing this by bringing data into every aspect of HR, from talent acquisition to employee engagement.

People analytics refers to the data collection and analysis techniques used to evaluate talent and measure employee satisfaction. Advances in algorithms and data analysis software are driving the explosion in people analytics. Many of the same data-driven developments that revolutionized sales and marketing departments are now happening in human resources.

Executives want human resources to back up their personnel decisions with data rather than subjective evaluation. HR can gather data on employees through assessments and engagement surveys. They can track performance reviews, productivity numbers, and peer evaluations. All combined into a dashboard to help make decisions—I like the sound of that, don’t you?

Collecting various types of data on employees allows you to eliminate guesswork and reduce costs in your HR processes. Subjective decisions have been engrained in HR for a long time. As much as they’ve tried to, eliminating all human bias from every decision is extremely difficult and highly unlikely HR professionals would make decisions off of “gut feelings” and their experience dealing with similar candidates and employees—a form of bias that data is now trying to eliminate.

Some fear using people analytics because they think algorithms will replace their expertise entirely. Instead, HR professionals should see the rise of people analytics as a growth opportunity. Companies now need an HR department with data analysis skills. In fact, 47 percent of companies say lack of employees with analytical skills is the biggest reason for not using people analytics.