As a concept, people analytics (or human capital analytics) has been around for years. Yet, if you’re like most businesses, the idea of incorporating advanced analytics into your HR practice is fairly new.

Thanks to technology and innovative approaches to data collection, however, what was once seen as complex and only available to large corporations is becoming more accessible and mainstream.

That’s important because HR analytics can help business leaders at companies of all sizes make thoughtful, data-driven choices when planning their HR strategies.

Still, if you’ve been holding out on embracing it – or if the phrase is completely new to you, you may be wondering:

• What is people analytics?
• Who can use it?
• What can a business leader do with it?
• Will it be worthwhile?

To help you get some answers, let’s take a closer look at how HR analytics can better your workforce.

What is people analytics?

People analytics is the practice of collecting and transforming HR and organizational data into actionable insights that can improve the way you do business.

By transforming raw data into meaningful insights, answers and solutions, people analytics gives you the ability to better understand your workforce and organization.

Using these insights, you can back up your instincts with facts and rely on data-driven strategies to help your organization grow while empowering and maximizing your most critical asset – your people.

Some of the most powerful and universally valuable people analytics are predictions for:

• Turnover
• Retention
• Attrition

Driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence, human capital analytics can enable you to:

• See the risk of employees leaving in advance.
• Understand the underlying drivers influencing why they might leave.
• Create an actionable plan for how to keep them.

Committed to inclusivity? HR analytics can also help you assess how diverse and inclusive your workforce is, potentially uncovering whether any hidden biases or inequities exist as you work to increase your workplace diversity efforts.

Who can use people analytics?

Companies in almost every industry can benefit from the actionable insights you can draw from using people analytics.

This is especially true once you’ve passed the 100-employee mark – when the size and the level of organizational complexity makes the data richer.

Beyond standard talent management analytics, the industry that you’re in will dictate which other aspects of people analytics will be most useful to you.

For example, if you’re in retail, manufacturing, home healthcare or any industry that employs mostly hourly workers, then overtime and compensation analytics will be very useful to you.

To reiterate, there is something for every company to discover with people analytics, but your category of business will determine which parts of the data are most important to you.

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