data analystPeople are the core of your business; we’re not yet at the stage where a successful company can run using AI alone. Investing in your employees will pay for itself as they become more efficient, more productive, and more motivated. There is tremendous value in the human beings involved in an organization, and it’s looking like data analytics can help unlock it. There’s a lot that’s based on gut instinct when managing employees, but imagine you had the hard data on hand to refer to when making decisions regarding the value that each employee brings to the company.

A Clear View of Performance 

There are some statistics that are easy to obtain: top salespeople, those who bring the most money in, etc., but it’s reductionist to assume that numbers equal performance. By just looking at gross numbers, it’s easy to overlook high-potential characteristics that could lead to better overall employee performance. If you use big data when monitoring performance, you should eventually be able to identify those employees who need more attention in the form of mentoring, compensation, and other factors. When you bring out the potential that’s perhaps masked by another person’s exemplary sales volume, you perform better as a company and can push everybody to their limits in a safe way.

Powering Through Change 

Change management is never easy, but it can be a lot easier if you have big data on your side to help shape the mindset. It’s harder to analyze response to change, because when emotions affect performance, it’s already too late. Good change management involves pre-emptively acting and making sure that employees are being treated in a way that preserves morale and productivity. You can achieve this by using and analyzing surveys (see inpulse.com for more on emotional surveying) that track emotions across departments and alert managerial staff about important concerns before they become problems.

Deciding Who Should Get a Raise or a Promotion 

It can be very difficult to separate the act of promoting individuals with natural human emotions, but sometimes those emotions will choose the wrong person for the job. Compensation should be a just reward for good performance, so when you apply data analytics to performance variables or used the best performance appraisal software, you should get a far more realistic and appropriate picture of who should be promoted than your gut will be able to show you.

Instead of always promoting the top 5 sales people, data analytics would allow you to look at trajectory and promote those who are improving constantly in the face of appropriate compensation. Recognition of value is likely to inject commitment and motivation into every employee, as when they feel like they are being identified for doing good work, they will have far more incentive to keep at it. If they are constantly overlooked, they will almost definitely become less efficient and less effective.

Data analytics has such potential to improve all areas of business, so it’s disappointing that more companies aren’t infusing their HR department with data analytical skills. As you can see, the rewards for doing so are massive.