In the digital world, it is very critical to understand that the employees come first and the customer comes after employees. You take care of the employees and the employees take care of the customer, business, future, and fortune of the organization. To ensure happy employees the organizations should provide the best employee experience and best employee engagement.
“Data is the lynchpin to keep the employees motivated. With the huge reserves of HR data in the organizations, it is important to analyze the data and deliver analytical insights with relevant metrics and make life easy for HR teams to analyze, understand, act and predict.”
To enhance and enrich the employee experience, organizations are heavily investing in Analytics / AI-driven solutions such as employee sentiment analysis, design thinking, employee journey maps, chatbots for talent acquisition and onboarding process, employee fraud management, etc. HR departments are now better equipped to measure employee satisfaction.
The advantage of applying analytics is that you can analyze the performance of your employees, the environments they work in and making decisions based on the data gathered throughout the life cycle of the employee in the organization. The data gathered and analyzed from attracting the ideal employees to the reasons for departing. With this information, you can tailor business decisions and improve performance organization-wide. As technology becomes indispensable to modern business, we are seeing more tools get developed to help manage the businesses and make them more successful.
With analytics using HR Data, you can improve working conditions, keep your talent, and lower business costs in the process. By adopting analytics and AI, HR is now focusing its efforts to build strategies and engagement programs to continually improve the holistic employee experience. Leading analytics heavy companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft have just begun to understand the ways to ensure the highest productivity, retention of top talent, diversity, and engagement, through the power of analytics few examples as below-
Employee Engagement
People analytics company Humanyze offers electronic badges that capture information from employee conversations as they go about their day, including the length of the conversation, the tone of voice involved, how often people interrupt, how well they show empathy, and so on. Using this technology, a major bank noticed that its top-performing call centre workers were those who took breaks together and let off steam collectively. Based on this knowledge, the bank implemented group break policies. The result; Performance improved by 23% and stress levels dropped by 19%.
IBM has used sentiment analysis to gather insights from employee posts on its internal social networking platform. For example, when IBM was overhauling its performance review system, the company turned to the internal network to ask employees for feedback on ideas for a new review system. They received tens of thousands of responses. Using its Social Pulse text analysis software, IBM surfaced one prevalent concern; employees did not like their performances being graded on a curve. Thanks to data and analytics, the company was able to act in time and discount this method in performance reviews.
Best Buy can precisely predict the impact of employee engagement on the performance of its stores. The results predict that a 0.1% increase in employee engagement leads to a rise of over $100,000 in the annual income of its store.
Boosting Employee Safety and Wellbeing
North Star BlueScope Steel has been working with IBM to design a safety program that incorporates IBM Watson’s cognitive computing power and sensors in wrist bands and helmets. The program, called IBM Employee Wellness and Safety Solution, delivers safety alerts in real-time to workers and supervisors. For example, if the technology detects a worker is not moving and they have an increased heart rate and high temperature, it could mean they’re suffering from exertion or even extreme heat stress – in which case, a supervisor could be alerted, or the employee advised to take a break.
Technology, particularly sensors, has helped to make the workplace safer for a long time now – think smoke alarms, security, and entry systems, etc. – but now, thanks to big data and analytics, companies are able to take employee safety to a whole new level.
Driving Performance
UPS has taken the use of data and analytics in performance management to an entirely new level. For example, the handheld computer that drivers have been carrying for years (those electronic boxes you sign to say you received your parcel) is actually a sophisticated device that helps drivers make better decisions, such as which order to deliver parcels in for the most efficient route. In addition, UPS trucks are fitted with more than 200 sensors that gather data on everything from whether the driver is wearing a seatbelt to how many times the driver has to reverse or make a U-turn.
By monitoring their drivers and providing feedback and training where needed, UPS has achieved a reduction of 8.5 million gallons of fuel and 85 million miles per year. Plus, drivers now make an average of 120 stops a day. That number used to be less than 100 – meaning the same drivers with the same trucks are now able to deliver more packages than before.
You’d think that monitoring employees so closely might cause a backlash among staff. But enhanced performance means the company can pay its drivers some of the highest wages in the industry, which no doubt helps support employee buy-in for data-driven performance. The company has also taken other steps to ensure they don’t face a driver backlash; for example, under the terms of drivers’ contracts, UPS cannot collect data without informing drivers of what they’re gathering. Nor can they discipline a driver based only on what the data has told them.
Data-driven HR allows companies to move away from traditional, time-consuming performance management methods like annual performance reviews (generally dreaded by managers and employees alike). Now, we can better monitor actual performance on a more regular basis (even in real-time) and provide feedback to employees in a more constructive, continual and consistent way.