Numbers for a “People Person”? 3 Ways Reporting and Analytics Help HR

If you’re a seasoned human resources professional, it’s likely you didn’t imagine you would need a deep understanding of numbers when you first began your career. Even if you wanted in-depth analytics, it used to be impossible to get data out of the legacy HR systems. Besides, in HR, we’re “people people.”

And yet, reporting and metrics are key to improving employee experience – and getting your job done. If you can’t see how employees are interacting with your HR systems, how can you optimize and improve your processes and tools? If you can’t identify bottlenecks, it’s impossible to staff your HR team appropriately. And if you can’t measure how your team meets service level agreements (SLAs), you’ll never be able to identify opportunities for improvement.

With easy-to-use tools available today, you don’t have to be a data expert to get real insight into your performance. In this post, we’ll explore 3 ways that reporting and analytics help improve HR service delivery and the employee experience – even if you’re not a “numbers person.”

 1. Performance

Analytics are crucial to understanding and improving performance. If you can’t measure your performance, how do you know if you are meeting goals, and how can you improve? It’s important to determine KPIs (key performance indicators) that are meaningful for your role and your team. Then you can build out tools that help you to measure those KPIs and track them over time.

Using reporting and analytics, you can measure your team’s performance to help them improve, manage SLAs, and keep up with employee expectations. And with the right tool, you can monitor adoption of your HR service delivery technology, which can help you to ultimately increase the ROI on your technology.

 2. Optimization

While there are benefits to merely measuring performance, it doesn’t stop there. Once you get a benchmark for performance, the continuous improvement can begin.

With today’s analytics tools, HR teams can identify bottlenecks in processes and then determine ways to streamline those. Once you track things like the category of an employee request or the time of day it was initiated, it becomes much easier to optimize the staffing of an HR shared service center. For example, you may want to shift the hours of some of your employees, or you may find that you need to add some specialists based on the requests that come in. By understanding the types of questions your employees ask, you can also improve your knowledgebase articles – which could lead to a decrease in call center volume due to an increase in self-service. Once you have the right analytics in place, it becomes simple to continuously optimize HR service delivery.

 3. Compliance

HR is often responsible for compliance in regards to employee files. This means gathering and storing employment forms and records, as well as any certifications required to do a job, for a specified amount of time. In the past, this might have meant managing paper documents stored across a multitude of locations. But with digital employee file management and a robust reporting tool, it becomes simple to proactively manage compliance.

With a modern tool, it should be easy to quickly pull a report and see where the organization is out of compliance – for example, if there are missing I-9 forms. It should also be possible to pull a report of documents, like certifications, which are about to expire. This helps HR to be proactive in tracking down missing forms, or managing recertification before it becomes an issue.

Getting the Numbers

As I mentioned, it was once very difficult to generate reports and meaningful HR analytics with closed legacy software. Today, modern tools like PeopleDoc’s HR Service Delivery platform provide easy to access your data, visualized in dashboards so you can quickly measure performance and identify opportunities for improvement. With tools like these, a “people person” can manage the numbers with ease.