Employee Analytics: What They Mean & How to Use Them

Employee stats are quite useful in the data-driven world of today. On top of them being capable of revealing the employee experience, they can also help businesses come up with best practices.

Employee analytics is an umbrella term that usually implies various workforce metrics, including but not limited to engagement, satisfaction rates, attrition and benefits.

The term is, however, not to be confused with “people analytics,” as the latter measures HR-specific processes and techniques.

Finally, the third term that is frequently used is “workplace analytics,” which measures employee productivity, engagement and efficiency.

Why Are Employee Analytics Paramount?

Employee analytics is commonly used to review the workplace practices and to influence future activities.

The evaluation of the ongoing practices is useful for establishing effective future actions. Some of the most important employee experience metrics include:

1. Turnover rates. Insights into the actual factors causing the employees to leave. By addressing the problematic areas, businesses can decrease the turnover rates.
2. Business Performance. Businesses with a solid employee experience have higher profits and customer satisfaction rates.
3. Improvements. Equipping managers with necessary tools for making better decisions and employees with the necessary resources.
4. Employee engagement. By addressing the problematic points and practices, businesses can increase employee engagement.
5. Company culture. Insights into employee analytics can help businesses create an authentic company culture capable of attracting prospective leaders. Nelson Sherwin, HR Manager at PEO Companies, thinks companies should pursue culture add with intent. In practice, that means working with recruiting firms with more diverse pipelines. It also means auditing interview scorecards and performance reviews for gendered language or other suggestions of bias.
6. Recruiting practices. By improving hiring and recruiting practices businesses can optimize these otherwise complex processes and eliminate potential obstacles and mistakes.

In other words, employee analytics cover a wide variety of areas that can help businesses improve all kinds of processes and practices leading to a better employee and user experience.

Employee Engagement

It has been established that employee engagement is a crucial factor determining overall business success. It impacts nearly all aspects of the business, including employee experience and productivity, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, company reputation, company culture and profits.

Employee engagement is a complex topic affected by a number of factors, including communication, the choice of tools and overall satisfaction.

To get a better idea of how to improve it, businesses often rely on employee feedback, surveys, internal communication and collaboration platforms.

Commonly analyzed quantitative employee engagement stats are turnover, absenteeism and Employee Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Employee Analytics: Examples

Because employee analytics include a slew of insights, examples are always helpful. However, keep in mind that they should be used as guidelines rather than a rule set in stone, for illustrative purposes.

Employee Benefits Analytics

Employee benefits play a large role in attracting (and retaining) employees.  While different businesses may offer different benefits, some of the most common ones include paid time off (PTO), health insurance, life/disability insurance, retirement savings or contributions, commuter benefits and family/medical leave.

Additional benefits may come to mind, such are training and wellness programs, both of which have been rather popular of late.

The common employee benefits metrics businesses analyze include overtime percentage, benefits satisfaction and healthcare costs per employee.

Employee Attrition Analytics

Employee attrition is an important metric because nobody likes to lose employees unnecessarily. Employees can leave for various reasons, all of which generally fall under two categories: voluntary and involuntary leave.

Voluntary leave includes all attrition cases when an employee chooses to leave (the usual one is resignation).

Involuntary leave includes all attrition cases that have been caused by the business (layoffs, restructuring and similar).

The most common employee attrition metric is the employee attrition rate.

Productivity Analytics and Efficiency Analytics

Productivity and efficiency analytics are indicative of employee engagement and are, hence, tremendously important.

The most important operational efficiency and productivity metrics include work efficiency, work quality, and time spent on target tasks.

Work efficiency measures the overall ability of an employee to get the job done. It is commonly assessed by an input-output ratio of a particular task over a designated time frame.

Work quality is being assessed via feedback detailing managers’ descriptions of employees’ work quality performance.

Time spent on target tasks is the metric showing how long it takes an employee to complete the target task. It is best used in continuity as it is capable of illustrating which employees aren’t motivated (they repeatedly spend too much time on a task). Note, however, that this metric is not always indicative of employees’ actual skills and abilities. Sometimes, people can spend significant amounts of time looking for information. In this case, this metric is indicative of the business being in need of better tools and communication platforms.

•       Internal Communication Analytics

Lastly, efficient internal communication is the single most important factor contributing to a positive employee experience. When tasks aren’t being communicated clearly and information is difficult to come by, employees will not be motivated and will be constantly underperforming. Again, the latter is not indicative of their lack of skills/motivation.

When employees aren’t informed, well-connected and engaged, things rarely go well. It is also paramount that employees are continually aligned with the business goals and empowered with the right tools to perform their job.

It is because of these reasons that businesses pay particular attention to developing efficient internal communication strategies. To ensure they are, actually, effective, it is essential to measure them. Common internal communication metrics include employee adoption rate, click-through rate (CTR), and open rate.

Employee adoption rate measures employee engagement on the target platform aimed at receiving internal communication.

Open rates measure how often the employee is opening internal communication channels (on target platforms and/or using email programs).

CTRs measure how many employees click a link sent via the communication channel.

Conclusion

Mentioned hereby are only some of the most important employee analytics metrics, to be used for illustrative purposes. Two other important metrics include:

•       Training efficiency analytics (completion rates, RoI and post-training performance assessments)
•       Onboarding speed analytics (time to productivity)

What is important to note when discussing employee analytics is that since we live in the age where data rules supreme, there are various privacy issues. It is crucial to ensure that employees’ private information is secure at all times. Regulatory compliance is mandatory, and so are full data encryption and security audits.

Be responsible and adhere to high morals, and your employees will be happier for that.