3 Pieces of HR Data You Have Been Wasting

Your HRMS software can be a prime source of intelligence for management decision making. While many companies track the main metrics around employee and recruiting data, it’s only an elite group who take HR analytics to the next level. Here we take a look at some common HR data sets which have huge potential but are often overlooked.

Training Absentee Data

While you may have development plans for your employees and they may include internal or external training, a savvy company looks at it from the reverse angle: who has not had training last year or even worse, in the past five years? Are employess happily challenged and benefitting from learning from colleagues on the job? Or do you have employees in roles beneath them and therefore training is not required. A lack of training can signify a lack of motivation or manager development. Your key to discovering the answer lies in your HR data, and as long as you track ‘training attended’, you can analyze the reverse situation.

Time to Promotion

Most compensation professionals will look at an employee’s compa-ratio to see who is paid highly compared to the mid-point for a job. It may imply that an employee is over-skilled and over-paid for the role, and should be under consideration for a promotion. How often do you look at the reverse, however: Who has been promoted quickly? Often, a quick promotion and indeed a series of promotions signifies a star performer. HR data such as career path, education and management of these employees should be studied in-depth to better understand the critical success factors, in the hope that they can be emulated and recreated in other employees.

Boomerang Employees

Many companies now have ‘Alumni’ programs or issue invitations to exiting employees to keep the door of communication open. While hiring new employees is an expensive matter, boomerang employees can offer specialized insight into your organization’s practices. Do you track who has returned? Further, do you do a detailed analysis as to why employees change their minds? What caused the employee to leave, and even more interesting, to come back? If you can crack this riddle, you’ll save yourself future headaches and costs of regrettable employee resignations.

HRMS metrics can provide power to your business decisions, as long as you assemble them with specific insight such as these we’ve discussed here. Do you have any specific business issues where metrics could lend a hand? Send them to us and we’ll try to feature them in a future article.