Unlock your true people potential with the new generation of HCM analytics

"Is it just me, or are more of our salespeople quitting these past few months?"

"Why is absenteeism in the warehouse so high?"

"When was the last time we saw a real productivity boost around here?"

These are the kinds of questions your people leaders and HR team ask every day. Your company likely has clear targets for people-centered KPIs like turnover, absenteeism, and productivity. It might even have a sense of where these KPIs currently stand based on manual reports compiled from different sources. But this approach is inefficient, error-prone, and frustrating for anyone who wants quick answers to simple questions. And when they do get answers, leaders don't want to spend another week repeating, "That number seems off. Check it again."

To operate with confidence and unlock your company's full people potential, your people leaders and HR team need an interactive HCM dashboard that offers:

• A clear view of your people KPIs and how they've changed over time
• Internal benchmarking to compare KPIs across different business units
• Smart alerts whenever a KPI moves outside a pre-set threshold

With these capabilities, your team can trace any changes in your KPIs to specific business decisions, which will provide the insight needed to make better decisions and build buy-in for maximum impact. Luckily, these capabilities are exactly what a new generation of HCM solutions now offers.

Here are some specific examples of how the new generation of people analytics tools can add value in real life.

Example #1: Reducing turnover with predictive insights

The problem

You sit down at your workstation and open your HCM system's KPI dashboard. Once inside, you learn that your sales team's 12-month turnover rate has been trending steadily upward. You check it against other units and see that this problem is unique to sales. Digging deeper, you see that this trend is causing a spike in your recruitment and training costs while negatively impacting your team's morale. Your company has tried tackling this issue with more social events and Free Pizza Fridays, but the numbers have gotten even worse.

The solution

Exploring your KPI dashboard, you realize that even though many of your sales colleagues are leaving after four to six months, the real problem is happening much earlier. The data indicates that two of the main drivers of turnover are unclear role expectations and a lack of proper support beginning all the way back at the employee's onboarding experience. And even though turnover is already at concerning levels, you see that it stands to get much worse in the coming months. This depth of insight is possible because your HCM solution leverages machine learning (ML) and 30+ parameters to predict future turnover with much greater accuracy than you're used to having. With this data in hand, you make the case for your company to take immediate action and invest in more comprehensive, personalized onboarding.

Two months go by, and whenever you sit back down at your workstation, you see your sales turnover rate (and its associated costs) ticking steadily downward. Once it's restabilized at a much better level, you create a threshold in your system and set up an automatic alert to nudge you if the turnover rate ever goes back above that level. This way, the right data can find you rather than the other way around. You don't have to spend time checking and re-checking your key stats. If there's an issue with your company's performance across any of your tracked metrics, the system will help alert you.

Example #2: Optimizing payroll when overtime becomes a bad habit

The problem

You work at a mid-sized manufacturing company that's facing a spike in payroll expenses that are badly damaging profitability. You've determined that the two biggest drivers of this issue are total cost of employment - which includes wages, benefits, and other employee-related expenses - and overtime pay. Your overtime costs have climbed especially high as the company's asked more employees to work beyond their scheduled hours to meet production targets. Your leadership is worried that the company's overall labor costs are spiraling out of control, and they're looking to you for a solution.

The solution

To start, you want real-time, user-friendly visibility into your payroll KPI data without needing to run manual reports. So you choose the metrics you care about most and add them to your dynamic, centralized dashboard, providing easy visibility to your leaders to ensure constant alignment. The dashboard quickly reveals a major issue: overtime pay has been high not only during peak production periods, but also during off-peak times. You dig even deeper to find out why this is happening. It turns out that the inflated overtime is driven by a combination of staffing shortages in key departments and inefficient scheduling.
With this data in hand, your company decides to make several key changes, including:

Staffing adjustments: Your company hires additional full-time employees in the departments where overtime has become routine, reducing the need for extra hours from existing staff.

Scheduling optimization: Your company adopts more flexible scheduling practices, making sure shifts are properly aligned with production needs. By leveraging predictive scheduling tools, you can balance workloads more efficiently, minimizing the need for last-minute overtime.

Enhanced payroll monitoring: You introduce real-time payroll monitoring to flag whenever overtime exceeds a pre-set percentage of total payroll expenses. This provides you with valuable alerts, allowing you to take immediate action to adjust staffing or reallocate resources.

After implementing these changes, your company reduces overtime pay as a percentage of total payroll costs, saving a substantial amount in labor expenses. Your colleagues also benefit from more predictable work schedules and fewer demands for overtime, which leads to improved morale and productivity. Another job well done.

Example #3: Winning top talent in a tough market

The problem

You work at a financial services firm that's facing big challenges in attracting and hiring top talent. Your team has scrambled to fill key positions, leading to long hiring cycles and growing costs to your company. To make things worse, the quality of your new hires has been inconsistent, leading to misalignment between skills and roles and lost productivity. Your company asks you to provide a data-driven strategy for solving the problem, and you happily agree.

The solution

Using your KPI dashboard, you delve into your recruiting data and quickly see several problem areas. Data gathered from your job postings, recruitment channels, candidate screening tools, and interview process reveal that your recruitment tools aren't properly calibrated against the goals of your job requisitions. Further analysis reveals that poor communication between recruiters and hiring managers is partly responsible for this misalignment.

In response, you advise your company to revamp your job posting format, recruitment channel selection, screening tool settings, and interview practices to better reflect the true needs and goals of your hiring managers. After you've made these changes, you look at your KPI dashboard and see your key hiring metrics moving in the right direction. As time-to-hire, time-to-productivity, and first-year attrition rates all decline, you assign dollar values to these KPIs to help your company understand the true ROI of their smart investments. That's the kind of impact and transparency your leadership loves to see, and the resulting influx of high-quality hires makes work life better for everyone at your organization.

Moving forward

These are just three out of thousands of possible applications of the new generation of HCM analytics. But the core principle running through all of them remains the same - we can measure, assess, and act on people-centered data like never before. We can significantly reduce the stress of data monitoring by setting clear thresholds and receiving important notifications whenever something is wrong (or whenever something is performing abnormally well, for that matter). This new era of analytics is making work life better not only for you, but for the millions of employees whose leaders can clearly see their challenges and respond swiftly and effectively. And it's allowing companies around the world to boost profitability and grow their ranks, bringing more and more thriving employees into their fold.

Learn more about how next-gen HCM analytics can help your company unlock its full people potential

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