People and work patterns change year after year—with or without a pandemic. But data shows that COVID-19 has caused a monumental shift in our work patterns today. Which, in turn, has forced people-leaders everywhere to quickly pivot...or fail.
Employers, HR professionals, and leadership teams...why not view this "great resignation" we’ve been cast into in a new light? With data-driven decisions that empower and retain employees, this shift can be a fresh start. So, let’s explore how to use your data to better employee experience, retain your valuable experts, and really, elevate humanity in business.
How HR professionals examine data in employee experience
Most companies simply study HR Data — open roles, compensation, employee experience, etc. But the study of data analytics in relation to employee experience has very little to do with HR and everything to do with the business. Remember, the only reason your company is in business is to make a profit. Studying employee experience requires not just HR Data, but data from across the business value chain.
It can’t exist in isolation; we must connect HR data to how work gets done.
At SingleStone, we study human behavior in all aspects of how companies deliver their product. We follow a customer journey and see how employees touch their work product. We then study qualitative and quantitative data to understand what really motivates employees to do the work the best way they can throughout that delivery chain. Sometimes it is improving the lighting. Sometimes it is adding a second monitor to a desk and sometimes it is a re-orientation of incentives or roles that makes the difference. It requires ingesting data from all areas of a value chain.
Recall the old school value chain…
Marketing has a great idea. They send it to Operations. Operations fulfills and sends it to IT. IT stores it.
So, when we study employee experience…
Marketing says: We’re pleased.
Ops says: I’m overwhelmed in my call center.
IT says: The system is bad and we’re getting yelled at all the time.
Don’t study employee experience in silos. Study across the value chain and think about the way things are delivered.
How data analytics is used in HR and employee experience
We can use data analytics to examine employee experience, but if we stop there, we’re missing a huge opportunity.
Empowering employees is not simple. You can’t directly empower employees, but you can set the conditions to maximize their effectiveness—and data analytics can help. Data analytics can be skillfully used to examine people’s work environments. If you can shape the environment, you can impact employee experience. Getting the conditions right – collaboration tools, real estate, incentives, perquisites aka “perks” — can greatly and positively influence the delivery of your product and service.
I can’t say “go, be empowered”, but I can look at someone and say:
Gosh, you look frustrated.
Yeah, you know, my eyes are strained from staring at my laptop screen.
Well… we could probably buy you a bigger monitor.
We can set the conditions for their success. When we use data analytics in an integrated fashion, not just a function, we’re more likely to spark empowerment.
How to measure your employee experience
Here’s the deal. Millions of frameworks and models exist for measuring employee experience. None of them are silver bullets, but we tend to like and favor net promoter score because “would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?” is such a valuable question.
The only way to measure employee experience is with a combination of tools and systems. Yes, pulse surveys. Yes, annual workplace surveys. But don’t stop there.
We often tell clients they’re probably already capturing the data somewhere; they just haven't connected the dots to see all the patterns. This is an opportunity for employers and managers to collaborate, analyze the data, and take action to improve employee experience and avoid losing teammates.
At SingleStone, we have a tool called Team Insights that ingests business, HR, finance, and workplace data to elevate patterns so the human eye can easily identify them. Unfortunately, for many companies today, the patterns are missed because we survey and report within our functional silos and never see the entirety of the value chain.
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to demo and share more about Team Insights with you. Send me a message and let’s connect.
