People Analytics Applied in Employee

Life Cycle

It is difficult to fathom the possibilities when analytics is applied to human

element without having a glance at its holistic view. For which it is necessary to
have the knowledge of employee life cycle.

Employee life cycle is an HR model that identifies the different stages of how an
employee advances through in an organization and the role of HR plays in
optimizing that progress, for better understanding. Employee life cycle can
divided into three phases – Planning and Acquisition (which covers work force
planning and recruitment), Development and Performance (which covers
learning, performance, and rewards), Engagement and Retention.

The first and foremost thing that HR has to do is the Workforce Planning i.e.
acquiring talent according to that plan and recruits them.

Once done the HR spends a substantial amount of time in the Training and
Development of these employees by learning about them and their
performance and later rewarding the employees.

The final and ultimate goal of the HR is to Retain the Employee on which it
has spent time and money.

The process is complex but it can be smoothened by engaging analytics,

because of its versatile nature. Analytics can be employed at every stage of the
employee life cycle and can help business smoothen their operations as well as
maximize profits.

In the Planning and Acquisition stage, using analytics an organization can

 Analyze workforce demographics costs and mix

 Measure the recruitment process efficiency such as number of open
positions, time to fill & offers declined.
 Forecast near term (weekly/monthly) or long term (1-5 year) talent
management.
 Optimize workforce mix and fulfillment plan
 Predict time to hire, offer decline rate and performance of a candidate
during the screening.
In the Development and Performance using analytics an organization can

 Measure productivity levels, analyze trends and compare to KPIs.

 Analyze compensation and benefit trend, flexible rewards
 Understand pay parity in the organization and link to employee
performance.
 Profile high performers within the organization
 Identify right training for the right people
 Measure an impact of engagement on business outcomes and identify
the key drivers.
 Maximize the perceived value of rewards, minimizing cost and increasing
employee engagement.

In the Engagement and Retention stage, using analytics an organization can

 Analyze unplanned absenteeism trends and the financial value of lost

work days.
 Analyze the managed and unmanaged attrition trend.
 Understand the retirement trend.
 Analyze engagement levels and trends.
 Articulate financial value of engagement to the business.
 Predict attrition risk at an individual level.
 Predict optimal intervention to reduce the risk of attrition for individual
employees.

People Analytics helps organizations at every stage of an employee life cycle to

make smarter, more strategic and more informed talent decisions. With people
analytics, organizations can find better applicants; make smarter hiring
decisions and increase employee performance and retention.

Critical Areas of People Analytics

People analytics when effectively used gives HR the ability to provide
substantive information allowing the businesses the support to reap significant
commercial gains. According to the recent studies, businesses with mature
people analytics perform 30% better than their competitors. It’s tough to
believe without evidence, so let me take you through some critical areas where
analytics can help HR:
 1. Talent Acquisition
“Talent Acquisition is extremely important as surveys proved that bad hiring
decisions cost around 30% of an employee’s first year potential earnings.”

Market nowadays is extremely crowded not only with competitors but also with
rich talent and it has become next to impossible for traditional HR
management to handle these issues properly. Simply because it is not able to
analyze this amount of data at an efficient pace, here in analysis steps in.
Using Data Science, Companies are able to filter through thousands of
resumes and create a base of the most promising prospects. Once analytics
has played its part, it’s easier for the HR teams to analyze each applicant
individually and to choose the candidate that they should invite for the
interview.

According to survey, 40% of hiring managers and HR professionals who have

made a bad hire estimated the financial loss of that hire in thousands of
dollars.

2. Training & Evaluation

It’s not enough only to hire the best candidates. The real job is introducing
them to their new duties and guide through professional training programs.

Once an employee is onboard, first of all they need to adapt to the corporate
procedures and then to learn all details about their positions and software
solutions that they are going to use at work. When this phase is over, it is
necessary to keep learning because a vast majority of businesses are
constantly upgrading their services for maintaining this pace at a continuous
learning process; employees attend online courses, training sessions and other
learning programs.

Data Science has the ability to examine employee learning and to conduct the
cost benefit analysis for every single course they go for.

3. Retention
Hiring people is not enough. Once an organization has spent a substantial
amount of time and money in hiring and training, it next target is to retain
precious talent. Even if you have a solid team of employees you can’t be sure
that some of them won’t be leaving the organization.
Attrition is among the top priorities for most of the companies. There could be
many reasons for this problem. Top reasons are: dissatisfaction and better
opportunities. Workers can be dissatisfied because their salaries are low. They
can also leave the company because of poor communication with the superior
or due to the feeling of underachievement.

Once an employee is trained, his value in the market increases and is more
than at which he was employed. This increases the chances of other companies
tempting an employee with a better offer.

Over one fourth of employees are in high retention risk category and many are
top performers or high potentials and posses critical skills. More than 70% of
high retention risk employees say they have to leave their organization in order
to advance their career.

Analytics can come handy in detecting and pointing out all such issues. It can
empower HR to analyze a huge amount of information that seemed unrelated
at first glance and can even help them draw valuable conclusions concerning
employee satisfaction.

4. Employee Performance
If employees in an organization do not perform no significant growth for that
organization can be achieved and this non performance may lead to doomsday
for the organization.

Analytics can help organizations monitor employee performance and

substantially reduce the chances of non performances.

It’s done by keeping an eye on all key performance indicators in real time for
each employee.

Analytics can also uncover mistakes and flaws in both work and workflow
which can prove to be valuable feedback for making things right in short
notice.
--Contributed by Chandrima Chatterjee, University of Calcutta