How Predictive Analytics Can Redefine Your Workforce
Ask any company about their most important asset and they'll likely say something fundamental to every business: their people. And yet, most businesses continue to make decisions about their workforce based on subjective gut instincts, intuitions and human biases.
Today, a smarter way to manage talent is emerging — predictive analytics. Using data-driven decision-making, HR departments can base processes like employee selection, development and separation on real-time, objective criteria.
But despite its buzzword status, the newest talent management trend still seems out of reach for most HR professionals. Even though HR departments sit on a wealth of workforce data—16 million data points on average for a Fortune 500 company—a scant 4 percent of companies are actually taking advantage of the information to impact their future workforce, according to a 2013 report from Bersin by Deloitte.
The Case for Using—And Understanding—Predictive Analytics
The potential impact of predictive analytics for HR is far from insignificant. Managers understand how employees are performing, but predictive analytics takes insights a step further: revealing why they are performing at that level, and how to improve their performance. By analyzing data on past and current employee performance, HR managers are able to make proactive decisions that can improve future hiring practices, promotions, separations and more.
Predictive analytics also provide HR departments with the unique benefit of testing simulations and “what if" analyses, in order to understand the effect of certain workforce decisions. What happens if you increase your vacation policy from two weeks to three weeks? What if you introduce an employee wellness program? Before deploying company-wide (and likely expensive) changes to your workforce, you can predict the impact that the change is likely to have through strong data analysis.
Not surprisingly, analytics programs can help HR gain a seat at the proverbial table: A Deloitte study found that HR teams are four times more likely to be respected by their counterparts for data-driven decision-making, and Bain & Company found that companies using sophisticated data analytics see 30 percent higher stock market returns than the S&P 500.
How to Use Predictive Analytics at Your Company
So, how can you kickstart a strong HR data program in your company? Our upcoming webinar, "Applying Predictive Analytics to Decisions About Your Workforce," on Tuesday, May 26, will walk through the basic principles of predictive analytics to help you understand your drivers of worker performance like never before. Attendees will learn how to define and build a big data strategy focused on workforce performance, how to get value out of existing data and identify new data to capture, how to follow the do's and don'ts of launching a data-driven workforce program, and more.
Register today to hear Michael Housman, Chief Analytics Officer at Cornerstone OnDemand, and Max Simkoff, VP of Analytics, explain how to translate your data and redefine your workforce.