by Maya Fetterman
People analytics can be used within human resources to assess employee performance metrics and predict business outcomes. Meaningful insights using people analytics can identify gaps to enable effective workforce planning leading to employee productivity and employee retention. They can assess various factors, for example, leadership, using a data driven approach to improve business results and customer experience.
Poor leadership within the workplace can negatively impact business performance. For example, employee micromanagement as a result of poor business leaders can lead to low morale in the workplace. Employees who excel at their jobs are not necessarily great leaders, and promoting them to management positions may be a waste of talent and time if they have leadership skill gaps. As a result, a method of assessing management efficiency using People Analytics, machine learning and people data is required to monitor those in management roles and their effects on other employees, in real-time, to confirm everything is running smoothly and predictive analytics can help give actionable takeaways to ensure the company's overall success.
The three key aspects of leadership that need to be analyzed using People Analytics are:
1. Leadership Effectiveness
The effectiveness of a manager is defined by how well they engage with their team members and facilitate interactions. This can be measured using people analytics to allow HR leaders to ensure that the right people are promoted to management positions and that time and energy are spent efficiently within the company, guaranteeing effective talent management. Managers can use this data to improve their own leadership skills and make decisions about how to allocate resources within teams. These actionable insights are importing in boosting employee productivity. A people analytics team within a company can work alongside data scientists and the HR department to analyze data about employee engagement, employee behavior and organizational health.
2. Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is defined by HR professionals as an employee’s emotional commitment to their job and company. Collecting data regarding employee engagement using people analytics tools can help the management team to improve employee retention, contributing to business success. Employee engagement includes three key components: feeling valued at work, pride in what one does and having fun at work. Employees who are engaged are more productive and less likely to leave the company than those who are disengaged. Organizations can identify managers who are negatively impacting their companies by measuring employee engagement on an ongoing basis, using predictive analysis and taking immediate action to improve the situation, using a data driven approach.
3. Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction assesses how happy employees are with their jobs and companies. This is an important metric for company success because if employees are dissatisfied with their work environment, it will show in the quality of their work. Poor leadership directly reduces employee satisfaction, so this is an important indicator of whether leadership is effective. Data collection for HR analytics can assess leadership and derive insights as to whether employees are satisfied. Other variables such as annual salary, team size, business needs and the hiring process all contribute to employee satisfaction too. These can be analysed by the HR team alongside leadership using advanced analytics and people data.
Assessing These Factors
Software development recently has allowed for the people analytics process and data visualisation to become more accurate and efficient. In the past, these factors could only be assessed through using questionnaires and conversations, which are not in real-time and can be inaccurate, causing data gaps. However, the use of sentiment analysis can produce a predictive model of employee engagement and employee sentiment. This analytics model can be used by the HR department to assess whether leadership is effective.
Conclusion
Monitoring these three factors with People Analytics in real-time would allow HR leaders to assess management efficiency and employee opinions. This would allow problems within the company to be addressed before they impact the entire organisation. ELEFense can help address these problems by analysing workplace culture in real-time using AI and data science. It will suggest actionable insights, thus improving workplace culture and overall business performance.
