Virtually every business across niches relies heavily on data, regardless of size. You use marketing data to shape your next marketing campaign, customer data to personalize your products or service recommendations, and competitor data to identify tactics to outperform them. However, if you want to drive internal change and transform your company from the bottom up, you’ll need to look at another data type – employee data.
Collecting and analyzing employee data offers valuable insights that can improve your processes and lead to a better, happier workplace that ultimately affects every aspect of your organization. See what you can learn from employee data and how you can use it to your advantage.
Valuable types of employee data
When you first start to collect data about employees, you’ll quickly notice that there are countless different types of data you could use, from personal information such as names and addresses to performance reports, educational and previous professional data, and more.
Some of the main types of internal employee data you could use include:
• Attendance data – who comes on time, who’s taking time off, when someone’s requested a sick day, etc.;
• Time-tracking data – how long it takes employees to complete tasks and projects;
• Performance data – time elapsed on projects, task completion rates, mistake frequency, etc.;
• Engagement data – do employees complete goals and meet expectations, collaborate with others, build relationships with colleagues, and what are their net promoter scores (NPS)?
Depending on your needs, you might also need to collect and analyze external employee data from third-party sources like job boards and forums. Including information such as job-seeker demographics, lack of or over-saturation of skills and competencies, preferred competitor hiring criteria, and more, external employee data provides a better understanding of the broader workforce trends.
How employee data helps your organization
Collecting and analyzing the right types of employee data offers enormous benefits. Some of the ways in which it helps your organization are as follows.
Identify and reward high performers
Collecting data types such as performance, engagement levels, and attendance can help create a clear picture of who some of your best employees are. You’ll understand which team members go the extra mile and deliver outstanding results.
The point of identifying the best performers isn’t simply to know who they are. It’s to reward them properly.
Rewarding good employees boosts productivity, increases morale, improves workplace satisfaction, and ultimately leads to better retention rates.
Assess issues before they get out of hand
Workplace issues such as poor communication between team members, quarrels, conflicts, and underperformers who are taking their teams down can be exceptionally harmful to your organization as a whole. Therefore, it’s critical to assess potential issues early on and solve them before they get out of hand.
You can collect the relevant employee data you need for identifying and solving issues through anonymous feedback forms, interviews, and questionnaires.
Additionally, you can use the same information necessary for identifying good employees to find out who some of your poorer performers are and learn how you can help them improve.
Predict workplace trends
External employee data is a wonderful source of information that paints the whole picture of the workplace trends in your industry. You can monitor what your competitors are doing and which positions they’re actively recruiting for to understand potential industry issues or skills gaps.
Furthermore, you can assess the competitors’ offers, including wages, benefits, and more, to ensure that you’re keeping on track with the trends and providing your employees with all the incentives they need to remain loyal and stay with your organization.
Collecting and analyzing the right employee data and putting it to use can prove to be an excellent strategic move. You’ll increase employee satisfaction, decrease turnover rates, and improve performance. Ultimately, you’ll notice positive changes to your bottom line as happy employees lead to happy clients and customers.
Final thoughts
Employee data is a powerful source of information that can help transform your business and improve your competitiveness. It enables you to keep an eye on your team members, assess the broader workplace trends, and set your company on a path to success.