As the job market continues to grow more and more competitive, HR and leadership now have no choice but to prioritize their employees' experience. It is up to leadership to create a remote work environment that meets high employee expectations and retains talent. Without a sophisticated and data-informed strategy, organizations are more likely to lose top talent to competitors.
At the same time, organizations are naturally collecting data from the digital tools employees rely on to complete their day-to-day activities. They’re sitting on a goldmine of machine-accumulated data patterns and doing nothing with it. That’s where people analytics can help. With people analytics, organizations are empowered to begin utilizing this data to better understand their workforce.
What exactly is people analytics?
Gartner’s human resources glossary defines people analytics as the “collection and application of talent data to improve critical talent and business outcomes.” Traditionally, people analytics was collected through various ways, such as the recruitment process, employee pulse surveys, exit interviews and 360-degree feedback.
However, today’s people analytics solutions can collect data from an employees’ tech stack and all the digital tools it's made up of, giving an accurate view of end-to-end work processes.
By combining traditional and modern methods of people analytics, organizations stand to unlock critical workforce insights, which they can integrate into a huge variety of work processes.
For instance, people analytics enables HR and business leaders to:
- Hire for culture fit and remove bias from the hiring process
- Inform talent decisions, such as promotion requirements and role design
- Accurately evaluate workforce performance
- Record and set realistic work outputs and project timelines
- Improve digital work processes
- Link your workforce to a state of emotion
- Inform training and development plans
- And search for all other patterns that can promote a positive employee experience
People analytics empowers organizations of all sizes to determine the root causes of common challenges they face, such as:
- Inefficient operations
- Missed business and revenue goals
- And poor employee retention
By receiving transparency into areas of frustration, with context for why they’re happening, organizations can apply the appropriate measures to fix them.
Why people analytics are superior to other forms of work analytics
Employers know that employee data analytics are essential to maintaining full visibility into their remote organization as they scale. Many organizations are already leveraging basic forms of analytics that come with their digital tools, such as MyAnalytics (for Microsoft), Adobe Workfront Reporting and Slack Analytics, to name a few. If organizations are comfortable working with their current tools’ reporting features, they may find implementing a people analytics tool on top of their other digital tools redundant.
However, although these tools provide accessible data about specific employee tasks, they don't report on your organization’s broader work system. This data is not helpful in tracking whether or not work within your organization is effective, or how your employees feel about it, because it’s looking at such a small part of their tasks. People analytics solves this by providing you and your employees with a holistic view of how work flows within your organization. Armed with this information, you can work collectively to optimize every process and deliverable.
People analytics is also not the same as data gathered from employee monitoring tools because it isn’t collecting information on anything that wouldn’t normally be tracked. By choosing to use people analytics over other data tools focused on employee monitoring or time tracking, you’re providing your employees with more privacy and control over their own data.
For instance, employee monitoring data tracks metrics like keystroke speed, mouse activity, URLs visited and active work hours. These “proof-of-work” analytics make employees feel watched. What’s more, none of this data actually indicates if an employee is succeeding in their role. Are they meeting key performance results? Deadlines? Client expectations?
People analytics offers this insight by showing how effectively employees are completing high-impact projects, without recording their second-by-second computer activity.
Step into the future with Pattyrn’s people analytics
Pattyrn is a people analytics tool that centralizes and analyzes data from your favorite platforms – email, calendar, task management and workflow management tools and video conferencing. It recognizes common usage patterns for each employee, making this information easily accessible to them, their manager and HR.
Together, they can access Pattyrn to identify:
- A workload that helps employees strike the perfect work-life blend and avoid burnout
- Which tasks are high priority, helping the employee successfully complete projects that drive a high reward, whether it’s ROI or personal learning
- If the employee is in too many unessential meetings or being assigned unproductive tasks
- How efficient a digital tool is in helping the employee complete their goals
- How the employee can form healthy work habits and efficient work processes
- Ongoing challenges the employee is experiencing that are hurting their productivity or performance and causing workplace anxiety
Your managers can learn how to excel in their role and best guide the employees in their team by accessing the data-driven insights found in Pattyrn. Or your employees can simply log in to their personal portal at any time, with or without their manager, to receive actionable insights and take full ownership of their job performance and productivity.
For a little more context, we use Pattyrn to guide all our clients as digital transformation consultants at WNDYR. Pattyrn shows organizations how employees are experiencing the transition to digital transformation to learn what processes need to be automated, integrated, and changed. Pattyrn gives them a better understanding of the health of their projects and teams to ensure that their company is resilient and thriving amidst their journey through digital transformation.
Simply put, Pattyrn can help your workforce achieve their business, professional and personal goals faster. Want to see it in action? Request a demo today.