How to Find the Retention Data You Need About Your Organization

More and more organizations are embracing business intelligence and the possibilities it opens up for them. With everyone talking about data-driven decision making, data-driven metrics, and data-driven goals, business intelligence is the essential piece your organization needs to gain more visibility and start operating more strategically.

Taking the leap into business intelligence can be daunting. However, by breaking it down into its core components, you can make it much more manageable to digest. And it all starts with the questions you want to answer. Let’s take a look at employee retention as an example.

Looking at Metrics for Your Retention Strategy

Say you’ve noticed quite a few employees leaving the organization recently. You may be wondering if your turnover rates have been rising recently, or if this is more typical. You may be wondering why any employee ever leaves your organization. You may be wondering how long it might take to replace that employee and how much it will cost to do so. And finally, you may be wondering what you can do to help increase your retention rates.

Once you know what questions you need answered, you know what data you need from your business intelligence software. For the questions just mentioned, for example, we may need to look at historical turnover rates to determine if these numbers have been trending upwards or remaining steady over time. To find out why employees leave, you need to hold exit interviews, document the responses, and ideally, compare these responses to those given in stay interviews. Average time to hire and time to fill can give you an idea of how long it might take to fill the newly opened position, while cost-per-hire can tell you how much you can expect to spend. And, to determine what might help you improve retention, you might collect data from regularly administered employee engagement surveys, implement changes based on the feedback, and measure the results.

Great! So how do we get all of this data then?

Custom Reporting for Business Intelligence Insights

All of this information is out there whether you’re aware of it or not and whether you’re collecting it or not. But it’s up to you to ensure it’s being collected, tracked, and analyzed to create meaningful and actionable insights – in other words, to enable data-driven decision making. In a modular HR and Payroll system, you may need to look in a lot of different places to collect the data, compile numbers in an Excel sheet, and manually calculate the numbers you’re looking for.

And all of this is actually just one small example looking at retention at your organization. The same applies to every other dimension of workforce management, including recruiting, onboarding, productivity, employee engagement, performance, operational efficiency, and so on.

On the other hand, a unified platform can greatly ease these processes, by keeping all of your workforce data in a centralized location. If this platform also has reporting capabilities built in, you’ll be able to draw up reports almost instantaneously. When you know what information you need and know what to look for, creating reports from centralized data will become an easy and painless task. After all, your business intelligence insights shouldn’t bog you down in data collection and additional work, they should quickly and easily provide meaningful information that lets you take action and drive your organization forward.

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