5 steps towards impactful HR analyses and reports

Based on the overall goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) of your organisation, propose the HR metrics that are most likely to influence these KPIs. Depending on your KPIs, different metrics can measure different things. Some examples:

• Absenteeism can be used to measure productivity or offer insights into overall employee health and/or happiness.
• Employee turnover data can be used to develop a plan to improve the quality of hires or to identify gaps in the employee experience that cause people to leave.
• Personnel costs, staff productivity and employees’ time use can measure how efficient your organisation is at enabling revenue generation through employees.
• Talent management efficiency can be evaluated by analysing performance improvement, test scores and upward transition in your employees’ roles within your organisation after you’ve provided training opportunities.
• Staff planning and capacity data can help determine the absence of a specific skill to fill a new type of job or the lack of qualified employees to fill leadership positions, for instance.
• Diversity and inclusion data can not only help you fine-tune your recruitment strategy, but it can also inform you about the effectiveness of your employer branding efforts.

Not every kind of HR metric needs to be followed up at the same frequency. To avoid under- or overanalysing, carefully determine the reporting frequency up front. Aspects that have a short-term impact on your business (such as absenteeism, staff productivity and time use, or staff planning and capacity) may benefit from weekly to monthly reporting. Meanwhile, quarterly or even annual reporting could be more relevant for long-term developments such as training and talent development, personnel costs, staff wellbeing and employee turnover.

User-friendly visualisation is key when reporting HR analytics. Various tools and platform can help you standardise this process by presenting your data through static and dynamic dashboards, charts, graphs and other visuals. However, it’s important to strike the right balance between customised and standardised reporting. After all, the ability to create ad hoc reports can be useful to provide insights in specific cases.

In HR analytics, reports are currently mostly used in a descriptive, diagnostic or predictive way. To move from this kind of reporting to decision-making and action-taking, it’s crucial to compare your analytics with standardised data from other organisations within your industry. You’ll also need to compare the data with your own zero measurements and/or your own internal benchmarks (e.g., between departments, compared to historic data, etc.). This is a powerful method to reveal best practices and identify areas of continuous improvement.

Depending on the technology at your disposal, you can also choose to use simulative or prescriptive reports, where recommended actions are automatically generated for you.

Showcasing the return-on-investment of HR and people analytics is key to convincing your organisation’s leadership of the long-term benefits. Be sure to communicate how the analytics connect to goals and objectives that benefit the organisation as a whole, such as improving talent acquisition and staff retention, increasing productivity, uncovering skill gaps, etc.

Additionally, communicating these results internally can also help develop and sustain employee engagement. After all, by showing how their data and feedback are being used for the benefit of all, you might just give their motivation a boost. What’s more, using data to tell and visualise a story could add to the effectiveness of your communication.