Within this view there are 5 major buckets:

1. Objectives & Business Goals – To be most effective you need to link workforce
analytics to your business goals. This means spending a bit of time articulating and
prioritizing your business objectives, goals and desired outcomes.  Your objectives may be
related to reducing turnover and gaining a precise understanding of turnover by segment,
the costs associated with this, etc. You may have succession planning on the agenda.
Whatever your top objectives, you need to keep them at the forefront and use your
analytics solution to bring insight to these areas.

 The next 3 fall under the umbrella of Analytics:

2. Metrics – Identify the metrics you need to capture that align to the objectives.  
Depending on your objectives, this may require seeking data outside of HR as well as inside.

3. Segmentation – This is where the meat of the process takes place. Once you have all
the metrics and data relevant to your objective, you can start to slice and dice the data
across the variables. With connected data, you can dig deeply into turnover. No longer do
you have to rely on broad numbers such as a company-wide turnover rate of 12%, but you
can start dissecting this with precision. You can look at turnover by demographics, tenure,
performance, engagement, learning, location, job/role… really any area where you capture
data.   This turns a generic understanding of turnover into a very specific one. Imagine being
able to identify that top performer turnover for a particular job role is 33% and the impact
of this is $1.5M in lost revenue per year. Instead of talking about one number with little
context (12%), now you have the ability to understand turnover by performance and role
PLUS the cost of this to the business.   And… you have a targeted place to start making
decisions and taking action.

4. Insight – Once you have segmented the data, it’s time to start drawing insights from
it. This means looking for patterns that support business objectives as well as looking for
anomalies, hotspots and areas out of alignments with business objectives.

And last but certainly not least:

5. Action – Armed with deep analytics and insight into business problems, HR teams
are equipped with the knowledge to take action and drive towards improving business
performance.

With much targeted insight into your business objectives (whether that is reducing
turnover, increasing engagement, succession planning, understanding Quality of Hire, etc.)
you can start tackling these issues head-on and in the most efficient and effective ways.
Taking our example above – if, through segmentation, you can pinpoint that turnover is a
particular problem among three specific groups of employees and you know that the
negative impact to the business is higher in one than the others; you know where to place
your focus on driving improvements.    

The world of applying workforce analytics to HR data can be very exciting but it’s easy to get
lost in all the data. That’s why it’s essential to approach workforce analytics within the
context of defined business objectives. Take the time to articulate your objectives in HR and
use your analytics solution to powerfully segment and gain deep understanding of your
priority areas. From here, you'll develop a data-driven view, be able to tell a compelling
story of what’s happening, and the insight to chart the way forward.