3 insights your HR data should tell you

This may seem to be stating the obvious, but do you know exactly how many employees you have working for you? For example, how many active and ended contracts do you have? Do you know how much your workforce is costing the organisation? It’s vital to have easy access to bottomline business information about operations. In fact, once utilised properly this data can be powerful for both the HR and payroll departments and the organisation as a whole.

Getting the basics right is important when making high-level and informed predictions about other aspects of the business. For example, with a clear understanding of month-on-month labour costs, it is possible to highlight any anomalies that may have arisen from unpredictable factors, such as employee absences or accidents. With more efficient ways of spotting spikes in costs, these can be minimised as much as possible, with HR and other departments swift to react and provide a solution.

Employees are human beings - not just expendable business resources. Businesses need to have more of an understanding of how employees operate and how the organisation can best react to and support employee happiness and wellbeing. Whether it’s optimised onboarding or self-service HR, HR and payroll teams have a huge role to play in employee satisfaction and engagement.
This insight will inform the business which benefits employees are prioritising, who can then tailor their recruitment and onboarding packages accordingly to make the business more attractive to potential talent. For example, employee benefits can really impact employee happiness and wellbeing. A Flex Income Plan, can give employees the power to choose their own salary package - including cash salary, statutory benefits and fringe benefits - which fit their personal needs.

The ability to pull consolidated reports on employee data from a single dashboard, and to see trends and predict based on existing data, means HR professionals can be quicker to spot anomalies, quicker to act on them, and quicker to solve them.

A single dashboard can be especially helpful to multinational organisations, as these trends can be tracked across large global workforces as well as drilled down to the local level to spot individual trends with specific teams and employees. Since an increasing amount of the workforce is changing from permanent to flexible and part-time roles, organisations need an end-to-end workforce approach that can give them a clearer view of the employment options and which departments are responsible for freelancers (e.g. procurement) and full-time staff (e.g. HR). This gives organisations a more holistic view of how healthy the business is as a whole and guarantees that HR teams have a seamless payroll experience in different countries.

With data giving HR teams 2020 vision within the organisation, employees will be happier and operations will be more efficient. The ability to look into the future with a new level of accuracy can ensure that the organisation is prepared for whatever this decade has in store for the European business landscape.