As the world’s largest economy, the United States is grappling with great resignation; companies worldwide have started to take note of the slow transfer of power to the workforce. Businesses are now trying their best to retain their top talent, so they don’t face the loss of institutional knowledge that can eventually affect their bottom line. But how does one do that? Though there is no ‘one rule fits all’ policy, specific data-driven tactics work well for most companies, helping them identify and retain top talent.
Simply put, a data-driven approach uses relevant data like trends, metrics, and facts to analyze and interpret it to contribute to achieving a particular goal or purpose, such as employee retention. As companies can no longer depend on ‘walking around the workplace to see who’s doing their job and who’s not, employing data-driven tactics to monitor employees’ efficiency in a remote and hybrid work environment would work best. Here are some powerful data-driven tactics to make your work easier.
Use Talent Data to Identify Your Company’s Movers and Shakers
Gathering talent data shouldn’t be challenging with online collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Companies like ESPN and McAfee use tools like ViaPeople to gather workforce data and identify the best performers. They even prepare for succession planning and take performance management decisions based on the data curated from similar sophisticated people management tools – thereby avoiding wastage of time and resources.
Let’s understand why employee data analytics is becoming prominent in reimagining workforce management decisions. For instance, Walmart, an American retail chain giant employing thousands of people across the nation, depends significantly on big data for employee attribution. It measures capability, movement, and employee turnover metrics to find its best performers. These metrics help Walmart analyze if the processes are running smoothly the way they were initially designed to.
Based on these metrics, the company also decides which employees to promote, which employees require additional training and other workforce-related decisions. This approach is greatly appreciated by the company’s employees, thereby resulting in the retention of more than 250,000 Walmart employees at different locations for over ten years.
Walmart gives importance to these metrics because it helps the corporation align HR analytics to their bigger business metrics, which are tracking customer experience and sales. Depending on your prime business goals, you can prioritize the same metrics or change them to best suit your purposes.
Retain Employees Using Data-Driven Tactics that Work
Companies with weak retention rates have employees coming in and going out frequently, which ultimately affects the company’s internal culture, productivity, and efficiency. It is why many HR’s toutemployee retention as their top workforce management challenge. Many companies use ways like offering a raise, additional perks, and learning or development programs, but how will you identify which of these methods worked best in keeping the best talent? It is where data-driven employee retention tactics come into the picture.
One of the best data-driven approaches to retaining employees is by identifying trends prevalent in your company. If you already have a serious employee retention problem, start by analyzing data related to the employees’ location, salary, performance rating, incentive compensation, years left to retirement, job function, the likelihood of promotion, and other data points. Studying this data in an organized manner will help you identify a trend and answer the ‘why’ of your employee retention problem.
HRs can rely on diagnostic analytics to better understand the trends and then use predictive analytics to help create reliable employee retention strategies for the future. Diagnostic analytics refers to advanced data analytics that deals with examining data to answer the ‘why did it happen’ aspect of a problem, while predictive analytics helps in understanding the ‘what is likely to happen.’ According to Deloitte, approximately 8% of global businesses use predictive analytics for people management for the value it adds to employee attrition, and so should you.
Conclusively as Jeff Weiner, Executive Chairman at LinkedIn, said, “Start the retention process when the person is still open to staying and not after they’ve already told you they’re leaving.” That’s what makes all the difference.
