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Engaged employees care about their work and their company. They don’t just work for a paycheck, or for the next promotion, but strive to achieve their company’s goals. Engaged employees truly believe in their organization, they want to make things better and ‘go the extra mile’. Indeed, engaged employees lead to better business outcomes. According to Gallup data, companies with a high level of engagement report 22% higher productivity.
Historically companies have conducted annual engagement surveys to monitor their employees’ discretionary effort, and commitment to the company. Results from these surveys rarely led to insights or actions and employees started to view these as a ‘check the box’ business commitment to engagement. Leaders need to take a much more holistic view to engaging people as part of their business strategy. Employee engagement is becoming one of the biggest differentiators between attracting and retaining top talent. Creating and maintaining a high performance environment is not easy, but people analytics can help by providing businesses with the insights to recruit people with the right skills as well as pinpoint any issues that negatively impact staff morale which can then be quickly addressed.
Below are six ways people analytics can be used to improve employee engagement.
- Identify key drivers
Understand what it is in your company that drives your employees and replicate that across your workforce. These drivers can be one of many factors including, involvement in decision making, the extent to which employees feel able to voice their ideas and be heard, the opportunities employees have to grow, or the extent to which the organization is concerned for employees’ health and well-being. Leveraging data from pulse surveys and HR systems, and not just annual benchmark surveys, will also help you identify these drivers in a timely way.
- Hire the right people
Use people analytics to improve the quality of your hires, ensuring they have the right skill set for the job even though they might not have a conventional profile. Measure the metrics to understand what makes a successful hire and plough that back in to your recruitment strategy. In addition, aggressively monitor first year turnover for new hires to ensure you are hiring the right people and have the right onboarding processes.
- Use your KPIs
Use KPIs to determine the productivity per employee and reference that against your company’s goals. You can then accurately forecast what staffing by department, as well as identify top performers and skills gaps within your workforce.
- Help your staff
Listen to your staff’s concerns and respond to them quickly. This may be by providing more effective training, implementing an ideas board at work so staff can be heard, encouraging people to take a walk during their lunch break, or providing other incentives. People analytics enables HR departments to assess and monitor their workforce. They can provide insights as to how staff can be better engaged by measure factors such as recruitment, performance, pay and wellness, enabling you to implement changes to increase employee productivity.
- Use your data to plan
Make sure you not only analyze the data but understand how to feed that into your business strategy whether it’s holding on to staff, or boosting their performance. Ensure that what is learnt from the data can be used effectively within your workforce. If leaders are not willing to support changes based on employee feedback than its better to not ask!
- Show your staff you care
By implementing people analytics and really delving into the work lives and performances of your staff, you can better understand them and what makes them tick. You can show your staff that you are adopting strategies that help them to be their best.
Put simply, engaged employees lead to motivated staff, higher productivity, better customer service, higher customer or client satisfaction, and increased sales, contributing to higher levels of profit and increased shareholder returns. Everybody wins!
