Five Reasons to Make HR Decisions Driven by Data

HR needs to shift to data-driven decisions to gain better insights into employee engagement, satisfaction, and organization in general. In addition, data-driven human resources decisions can increase HR’s measurable impact on business.

Let’s view five reasons why you need to empower your HR decisions with data.

1. You’ll boost recruitment

If you want to create a place to attract top talent, you need to foster an inclusive experience for employees. The latter will influence whether candidates stay at your company and feel valued or leave for good.

Over 40% of people, according to McKinsey, turned down a company’s offer due to the organization’s lack of inclusion and engagement.

Using data, you can understand ways of improving these engagement rates starting from the early stages of hiring.

Data analytics is a lifesaver for an optimized recruitment process, better candidate selection, and onboarding.

For recruitment, data can provide insights into:

• what reasons make candidates choose your company
• what grabbed their attention in your vacancy description, ad, offer
• what policies and benefits they value the most
• what makes candidates leave their previous jobs
• what worked for candidates during the selection process and onboarding

Moreover, analyzing reasons and cases in the previous recruitment process is a way to boost future campaigns and get rid of those deteriorating factors that influenced your hiring success before.

Empowered by data, you’ll pass bottlenecks and be able to deal with recurring problems once and for all. For example, you evaluated a group of candidates that declined your offer due to a small number of day-offs per year. Isn’t it the way to reconsider your day-off policy or emphasize stronger sides of your company during the interviews to lower the number of declines?

2. You’ll understand core problems

Having data analytics at hand, an HR team will understand the critical factors and improve those initiatives, policies that are not performing well to boost their effectiveness.

On the other hand, the more you look into data and analyze it, the more insights you can get in terms of employee productivity, engagement, burnout rates, and general company success.

Suppose there are problematic zones in different departments (high turnover rate and dissatisfaction rates, poor engagement, and other issues). In that case, you should gather all this information to work on it and come up with relevant solutions.

With data, you can see the essential issues of a department or within the organization. For example, while you may have a hypothesis that productivity drops due to high burnout rates, the data from surveys and one-on-one feedback sessions may show that the low work ethics of certain employees is the core problem.

Use data to identify the real issues and start dealing with them. But, of course, it is always better to solve the problem at the very beginning to eliminate downsizing, dismissals, and other unpleasant situations.

3. You’ll help executives to organize business processes better

As a continuation of the previous point, data-driven human resources improve collaboration with company executives. You help them to understand issues within a company and to improve these issues.

With data, you can provide analytics on which initiatives work and which don’t, what areas require improvement, and offer solutions for different departments to enhance their processes.

Data will help choose the right vector for company development and better support the marketing department’s target campaigns.

If you have real numbers and feedback of employees on a separate event, you should share it with C-board and executives. If the data shows real problems, you must deal with them. In this way, executives receive a valuable source of information from HR data that help them reorganize inner processes, impact business growth, and follow a business objective, say, attracting investors monthly.

4. You’ll be able to build healthier company culture

People are the main drivers of every business. Hence, if you can put the right person in the suitable role, not only the productivity levels will rise up high, but the entire company culture will win. However, it may not be enough to sustain company culture in the long term.

A data-driven approach here is to gather all the information about employees’:

• work ethics
• relationships within teams and between departments
• communication and collaboration abilities
• feedback about team members and team leads
• hobbies and interests
• personal growth and development
• stress-resistance and conflict management

These valuable insights allow you to understand what your company lacks in culture, team spirit, and a healthy environment. HR teams are also able to increase engagement and employee satisfaction as they get.

The best way to gather such insights is to send regular feedback surveys or forms or initiate one-on-one sessions.

Such data will also show areas that need improvement and help build a healthy company culture. Knowing what works for people in the company and what doesn’t, it is easier to decide and offer solutions to maintain a healthy work environment.

5. You’ll have better team spirit

Team buildings, training, and knowledge-sharing sessions have become an integral part of any company. HR teams are working hard to offer new initiatives to educate employees and provide them with events to increase their team spirit.

However, all the offered initiatives are usually based on trends in the industry rather than people’s preferences. If you provide something that has nothing to do with employee requests, you will hardly receive positive feedback with little or zero engagement.

Every new activity of such type should always be based on collected data to have a solid effect on employees. Simultaneously, gather feedback after each event.

While you can do this with a qualitative approach and get thoughts by hosting webinars internally with each department in your organization, it’s likely better to take a quantitative approach and use a survey instead.

If your company is planning to conduct training, organize surveys and ask people what they think, what topics are of the most interest to them, and what core problems they are looking to solve.

You will make decisions on such activities supported by real feedback. As a result, employees will grow trust towards a company that listens to their preferences, understands their weaknesses, and helps find the best solutions to cover them.