HR Data is crucial more than ever in 2023. There are multiple reasons to prove the same.
To HR professionals, 2022 was the year of quiet quitting. The declining economy didn’t help people feel less dissatisfied and disengaged at work. After a drawn-out fight with COVID and the Great Resignation, employers and their employees share a common struggle – how to be happier at work?
According to the last year’s Gallup report, job dissatisfaction has hit an all-time high:
- 60% of people are emotionally detached at work
- 50% are feeling stressed at their jobs every day
- 41% of people are worried about their jobs
- 22% of people feel sad while working every day
- 19% are miserable but are in no position to quit
The situation might seem beyond repair, but HR data can help fix and improve it.
HR data can tell us what people genuinely want
HR analytics is a data-driven methodology that helps employers and HR professionals make wise investments in human capital. It involves collecting employee data and analyzing people’s problems. Think of it as customer-centricity turned inward, focusing on a deeper understanding of the employee.
In the era of quiet quitting and overall job dissatisfaction, leading employees are hoping that HR data could improve productivity and efficiency, ultimately saving their companies from financial ruin. Though their bottom line is the ultimate goal, HR data has many benefits and side effects.
In a nutshell, HR data is about understanding what employees truly want.
Unlike more traditional ways of collecting employee feedback, this one is more organic. It implies complete anonymity, so it is more objective and accurate.
However, like traditional ways of collecting feedback, such as surveys, HR data is only a tool for employers to understand and apply to daily actions.
Personalized L&D and career opportunities
When it comes to employee engagement, one of the most critical areas of improvement is how a company applies and nurtures its people’s skills. Lifelong learning is another sign of the times, just like quiet quitting and job hopping. A company must prepare its employees for that.
Ironically, equipping your employees with different career opportunities works very well as a talent retention strategy. The more options you give them, the more likely they’ll stay.
HR data plays a crucial part in that. It gives you the necessary insight into your employees’ current skills and helps you analyze (and realize) their full potential. Understanding all that is a precursor to developing a personalized and genuinely engaging learning and development program for employees.
Learning & development (L&D) is powerful because it shows people that you care about them enough to invest in their skills. That is usually rewarded with loyalty and talent ROI.
Recognizing and rewarding the best workers
Employee recognition and employee engagement are the fastest and most secure ways of keeping a good worker on the team. It’s also a way to boost productivity daily, as well as motivate people to go that extra mile – which is how you prevent quiet quitting and turn the workforce into a competitive advantage.
However, according to Gallup, today’s employees want recognition to mean something.
Meaningful employee recognition must feel fulfilling, authentic, equitable, and personalized. HR data could help develop employee recognition programs with these novel standards in mind. It can tell you who deserves a reward and what kind of reward they want.
HR analytics can also help you keep tabs on your employees’ daily merit. That way, achievers won’t have to wait for the annual evaluation cycle to receive praise for their hard work. A casual “Good job!” could mean a lot for the underachiever’s ambition. HR data can tell you the right approach.
A data-driven approach to improvement
Systematic improvement is the most significant contribution of HR analytics. Why do some of your employees perform better than others? How does that make both of them feel? Are overachievers satisfied with their compensation? How can you improve all that?
In business and elsewhere, blind guessing has historically been the downfall of many great leaders. Every entrepreneur and their manager knows that decisions must be data-based. The alternative is just too uncertain and risky. You can’t plan for the future if you don’t understand the present.
Of course, HR data is not a magical solution. You need to know how to apply it.
That is why we define HR analytics as a methodology rather than a data collection technique. If you know what to look for and how to read the results, HR data can help you understand – and overcome – the critical challenges of today’s workforce. These are only some of the problems it can help solve:
- Identify reasons for burnout and manage workload better.
- Analyze productivity issues and boost daily efficiency.
- Improve team morale by examining teamwork dynamics.
- Prevent quiet quitting by finding the right motivation.
- Reduce employee turnaround by improving engagement.
Conclusion
Data has long been the backbone of successful businesses. The fact that we’ve waited this long to start using it to improve the employee experience is a systematic mistake – to say the least. In 2023 and beyond, it will hopefully help HR recover from old mistakes and recent hardships.
