HR Analytics: How BI Dashboards Support and Streamline Employee Management

Strategic Benefits of HR Analytics

Metrics have become a rich resource in today’s business environment, and Human Resources is especially capable of leveraging the value of those metrics with an eye to increasing the organizations’ productivity and profitability.

Since HR monitors and manages the performance of the organization’s workforce, the data it touches provides the ability to track, predict, review, and compare outcomes so that the company can optimize what works and minimize processes, resources, and whatever else that doesn’t deliver as expected. HR dashboards—software apps that have emerged as essential components of business operations worldwide—help crunch the volumes of data that an organization gathers in ever more complex ways yet can deliver results and insights with more simplicity and clarity than ever. Raw data is turned into meaningful, actionable insights that can guide an organization to be its best.

It’s been said that its people are a company’s most valuable asset. As such, it is important for HR, as well as all of management, to have a clear understanding of workforce effectiveness and to confidently predict the impact of change. Yet, with all the data at its disposal, it’s easy for HR executives to miss the nuanced picture the data has to offer, which is why smart dashboards provide big returns as they help guide decision-making that affects every aspect of Human Resources—from recruitment to payroll to productivity to retention.

HR dashboards provide powerful features for direct, day-to-day workforce management as well as the ability to get higher-level insights about the workforce and their performance, absenteeism, turnover, training costs, attendance, compensation and benefits, engagement, and much more. HR analytics-capable dashboards have become a foundation for strategic decision-making in HR and for the organization as a whole.

Reporting on the workforce is one of HR’s essential tasks. When done right, it offers four key benefits for both HR and management:

1. Monitoring and tracking of key workforce metrics
2. Providing management with insights to keep them informed
3. Tracking problem areas to see current trends and avoid future problems
4. Ensuring accuracy so that managers can make optimal, informed decisions

6 Key Areas To Streamline With HR Dashboards

1.     Hiring and Recruiting

The first place that employers experience the benefits of HR dashboards is in their ability to enhance and streamline the recruitment process itself. With all the data coming in, the recruitment process can be monitored and analyzed, calculating and tracking key recruiting metrics that will be valuable to assess. Helpful metrics to monitor include time-to-fill, time-to-hire, age-of-job, cost per hire, and offer acceptance rates, for example.

For example, HR dashboards can also help employers discover where top performers found the job listing so they can choose to boost that channel or disengage from those that aren’t performing as well. With the help of the dashboards’ easy-to-understand analytics, they can identify the higher-quality, better-fitting candidates faster by being able to predict how new prospects might impact the company’s long-term success. Dashboard analytics provide decision-makers with actionable insights to make the entire hiring process more cost-effective.

2.     Employee Management and Development

With HR dashboards, managers can get a thorough view of the data about a particular employee with a single click. It becomes easy to arrange and sort any information pertaining to employees, from profiles and records to background checks. Individual and department performance can be monitored and viewed from many perspectives so managers can continue to drive productivity.

3.     Payroll Monitoring

According to Marc Holliday at NetSuite, the cost of payroll for many businesses is between 15 and 30% of sales revenue, and for service-based businesses, it can even climb up to 50%. Such a costly component of the organization requires efficiency and streamlined operations at its best. HR dashboards make that possible, providing insights that help to leverage employee payroll, tax, benefits, and PTO data.

4.     Managing Skills and Monitoring Training and Performance

Employee performance management is one of the most important functions of an HR department. Skill building and high performance directly translate to the business’s productivity and success. HR dashboards provide the ability to monitor the strengths and weaknesses of each employee in the company, which can be referenced for performance reviews and can be used as a reliable basis for setting goals and monitoring their progress. With HR dashboards, managers can review training program metrics such as completion percentage, hours, and cost and see results by department, program, gender, and more. Needs can be addressed more quickly when they are spotted early, and excellence can be rewarded for small gains as well as large ones.

5.     Managing and Monitoring Retention

Capturing simple figures such as the number of people an organization hires and the number who leave provides only a baseline of information and not much, if any, actionable insights that managers can act on. HR dashboards allow users to drill down from higher-level metrics and see the details that comprise them. With the metrics, analytics, and reporting provided by HR dashboards, HR and managers can recognize issues in their early stages and track their resolution over time. Managers are more in control, and able to drive improvements, reducing the risk of losing star employees unnecessarily.

6.     Monitoring Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is an expression of employee satisfaction; the more engaged an employee, the more satisfied they are with their position. It is demonstrated by employees being involved with, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and their workplace; thus, it is a key factor in both productivity and retention. HR dashboards provide powerful insights about employee engagement through monitoring metrics such as rate of promotion, turnover, employee satisfaction index, and active intranet users. The ability that an employee engagement platform can provide is to analyze the commitment per employee, per department, or for the organization as a whole helps leaders build better teams and grow productivity and loyalty.

HR Dashboards: Centralizing HR Data & Delivering Actionable Insights

HR dashboards elevate the effectiveness of HR in several ways, beginning with the fact that they provide the department with a centralized data system that makes the department’s data, metrics, and actionable insights readily accessible to the entire HR team.

If the team can’t trust the data they access because it comes from different sources and in different formats and contains redundancy or inconsistencies, it dings productivity and can make it more challenging to agree on objectives you need to pursue to move the needle for the company. With centralized data, on the other hand, data becomes more consistent across the department and the company. HR can establish a single source of truth, which helps to build trust in the data, increases collaborative efficiency, promotes a sense of teamwork, and helps to align everyone on the same set of goals.

In-depth HR performance analysis depends on comprehensive, reliable, and clean data—when data is centralized, combined, cleaned, and in one place. This can easily provide you with powerful insights—derived across platforms—to help you increase productivity and make smarter decisions faster. As a result, HR dashboards can help your HR and business management to better assess the team’s productivity, monitor the progress of key projects, measure the effectiveness of HR campaigns, and challenge employees by setting goals and objectives they can all buy into.

When you connect all of your disparate HR systems and data via an analytics dashboard and data warehouse tool, you get a highly impactful reporting platform. Data from popular HR tools, such as BambooHR and TSheets, as well as most other employee management, time-tracking, employee payroll, and employee training tools, can be useful to help you monitor performance overall, giving you unprecedented insights for HR management. Or, you can drill down to significant detail to chase down causes and effects.

Beyond facilitating data management, centralized data also helps promote department-wide collaboration. After all, some HR employees might not otherwise have access to all of HR’s productivity tools. When data is centralized, though, that is no longer a hindrance to their ability to collaborate and benefit from the insights the data offers.

A uniform, reliable, centralized data set for all HR data also yields far deeper and more insightful metrics than disparate data systems alone. Here’s why. Metrics can be either direct—meaning they are extracted directly from a single data source—or derived—calculated based on data from different sources. Derived metrics combine multiple direct metrics into formulas that report on performance more broadly and accurately — giving you more penetrating and practical views of HR processes. With access to multiple data sources, your HR dashboards can provide significantly more actionable insights with derived metrics to track critical factors such as engagement, training and development, recruitment, hiring campaigns, absenteeism, and more. Examples of favorite HR derived metrics include:

• Cost per hire
• Pay Equity
• Overtime percentage
• Productivity Rate
• Absenteeism
• Diversity and Inclusion
• Profit per Employee
• Healthcare Costs per Employee
• Cost of HR per Employee

Go here for a list of HR KPIs to track these factors.

Undeniable Advantages of Automation

Sure, giving up the familiarity of Excel can be emotionally challenging for some, but the amount of time that is freed up due to automation, enabling HR staff to be more productive and efficient—and even enjoy their work more—is undeniable. When the compilation of data is automated, there’s no need for staff to manually gather data from separate systems, spreadsheets, or reports. After all, manual reporting in Excel can be costly because it is time-consuming and error-prone. Simple typos can cause havoc, inaccurate or out-of-date formulas and macros can return erroneous results, and collaboration can be difficult due to inevitable version conflicts and lack of information about who updated what and when.

Reports are only as good as the data they draw from, and, for HR, accuracy translates to credibility. From background information and development training to pay structure and bonuses, data must be accurate and uniform in order to be undeniably trustworthy for the organization to make its best decisions. Dashboards with automatic data refreshes are efficiently and automatically updated, generating reports that only rely on real-time and up-to-date data. That results in trustworthy and accurate performance metrics and truly actionable takeaways.

HR analytics dashboards also offer automated reporting for managers, C-suite executives, and for employees too. Instead of an ad-hoc approach to report requests, HR reports can be deployed proactively in pre-scheduled frequencies. Performance goals, achievements, updated strategies, and critical information can easily be communicated to key stakeholders via automated emails that deliver the latest metrics and reports. Interactive dashboards sporting the latest data and insights can also be shared with employees or partners via public or password-protected links. Better communication means increased transparency and better accountability, which, in turn, fuels everyone’s desire to be more productive, effective, and successful.

Of course, reports-on-request are always available; they’re just no longer a panic-stricken affair.

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