Leading companies, small businesses, and public employers use people analytics and a dependable total workforce management system to improve decision-making and do things differently than others. Their practices and technology investments separate the best from the rest.
Investing in a logical platform that dissects data isn’t a phenomenon that arrived and left during the pandemic — it was a strategic decision for many employers that’s expected to increase each year going forward. Using workforce management to deliver unparalleled value to your business, department, and employee base is a clear mandate for heads of human resource divisions as they strive to build a data-driven culture.
Today, people analytics has been getting a lot of attention because of the challenges that organizations face, whether they work in construction, health care, finance, entertainment, hospitality, food services, manufacturing, retail, government, or even first-responder sectors such as police and fire. The world’s changing economy and workforce demographics are signaling that employers need to put a greater emphasis on how talent shortages impact the bottom line, as well as how compensation, training opportunities and remote work affect employee retention.
Dashboards, Metrics, & Monitoring: Total Workforce Management System
Using a total workforce management system, key metrics are tracked in user-friendly dashboards, which can keep tabs on total workforce cost, voluntary turnover, source of hire, failed hires, miscellaneous metrics, and time since last promotion or pay raise.
Talent shortages and challenges in filling open positions often lead to dashboards being used in recruiting. Recruiters are ditching spreadsheets in favor of more sophisticated plug-and-play recruiting tools that bring new efficiencies to tracking key metrics. You can use dashboards to identify hiring sources that aren’t performing as expected, view bottlenecks in talent pipelines, or even rework job descriptions. A dashboard can also show which candidates drop out of the hiring process at disproportionate rates so you can tailor or fine-tune your process.
Your recruiting team should spend more time talking to candidates and less time doing manual data entry. With total workforce management, it’s possible to automate data collection and analysis so recruiters have more time to talk to applicants.
Using a Total Workforce Management System to Break Down Barriers
Building bridges between human resources and finance departments is key to having success in your people analytics strategy, and the right total workforce management system can help.
It all comes down to helping your finance colleagues understand how human resource leaders view analytics and vice-versa. For instance, from a holistic perspective, you can aid in their comprehension of job vacancies using the right metrics. A vacancy doesn’t just mean cost savings — it can affect the company’s overall performance in the medium term and long term.
In turn, a finance department can educate workforce management leaders on how it measures success through partnerships with human resources. You can structure workforce data in a way that makes sense, converting human resource results into numbers that finance leaders will enjoy analyzing as they collaborate with you for shared results.
Total Workforce Management System Data: Integration, & Best Practices
In order to make better people decisions, it’s important to integrate data from multiple human resource systems, especially in a world where user expectations have evolved. Businesses are increasingly assimilating employee data with other internal and external information and figures, and many are also building workforce management playbooks for connecting data from human resource management systems to other talent platforms, including application programming interfaces.
They are pulling over sales, customer relationship management, and learning data — along with external data (such as labor market information) — to help leaders make better decisions. Using integrated people-analytics information effectively can save businesses millions of dollars over the long term.
The force behind these initiatives comes from a simple-yet-repetitive digital strategy of combining and linking data in astute ways. At the end of the day, total workforce management system providers make people-data more portable and handy so leaders can make the right decisions on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. A system set up correctly will integrate data from different operational systems and distribute appropriate insights throughout an organization as needed.
Decentralizing & Democratizing Through People Analytics
To maximize their impact, some of the best employers transfer people data into the hands of non-human resource leaders to help make decisions and objectively optimize their employees’ experience. When more business leaders at the top start reviewing and asking questions about people data through their company’s total workforce management system, it creates a unique labor and talent-driven effect on workforce management departments. People analytics get shared outside of human resources — something exciting to see.
Today, there’s a lot more attention being paid to non-human resource users by workforce technology providers, but there’s still room for improvement. In the human resources analytics arena, more solutions providers are recognizing the importance of treating senior business leaders from all departments as full-fledged users of workforce dashboards, monitoring, and so much more.
That’s why it is increasingly important to team up with a workforce management solutions partner that can make people data understandable and actionable for “non-techies” and non-human resource leaders. People who work in human resources or need access to workforce data aren’t necessarily data scientists. People-data should be translated into understandable insights and recommendations for any end-user so everyone can share in the analytics deep-dive.
Leverage Analytics to Measure Success, Not Assumptions
Using proven analytics tools that are offered through a total workforce management system, companies can determine whether key human resource initiatives actually pay off — through metrics and logical analysis, not hunches or gut feelings.
For example, some companies use stay-bonuses to boost employee retention. A significant bonus is given to new employees who remain for one year or more. However, many employers find that stay-bonuses don’t impact retention one bit even though millions of dollars are spent on these efforts over time. To stem attrition, many employers have eliminated retention bonuses in the long run. A workforce management system can help you dodge these types of expensive errors.
In other instances, employers have used total workforce management to gather information and find out they were about to lose a significant amount of their female employee base because they were requiring those workers to return to work at specific periods in their life. This can make return-to-work conversations easier to optimize at an individual level for each employee, all based on real-time data and survey responses.
Overall, today’s new focus on having a total workforce management system has translated into a growing appetite for people analytics so senior leaders and non-human resource managers can make better people decisions. This is true for both in-office and hybrid employee management structures. Consequently, more human resource departments are using next-generation analytics technology to integrate disparate worker data and provide leaders across the board with actionable insights to make better decisions.
VCS Software
VCS Software is your all-in-one solutions platform for total workforce management system software whether your business, organization, company, or public agency is large, medium, or small. Our solutions fit your exact needs since organizations can start with core products and use add-on modules for additional capabilities. Contact us to start building a tailored, optimized plan that best suits your needs.