Workforce analytics help organizations better understand how their workforce is performing and progressing. While the financial aspects of an organization are much easier to quantify, human resources metrics like employee performance are more challenging to measure and report on. And with labor costs often making up the largest portion of organizational budgets, getting a clear view of your people data is essential. 

That’s where workforce analytics software comes in. 

Such specialized software can give your organization the tools and analytics you need to draw meaningful metrics and gain important insights into your workforce. These insights are especially important as organizations grow, evolve, and become more complex. 

However, not all software solutions are created equal. 

Let’s take a closer look at some examples of workforce analytics and why a holistic human capital management (HCM) platform with built-in analytics could take your HR processes to the next level.

What Are Workforce Analytics?

Workforce analytics covers a wide range of metrics for many different aspects of the employee lifecycle. It encompasses metrics related to recruiting, employee performance, retention, and more. 

Whether you’re collecting it or not, there’s plenty of data about your workforce. Collecting this data and organizing it into meaningful figures can help organizational leaders gain a better understanding of their operations and make strategic decisions to identify inefficiencies and proactively make improvements.

Workforce analytics are especially crucial for human resources as this department focuses on people analytics and HR metrics for the organization. These analytics enable HR managers to form a solid understanding of how the company is doing and what direction it’s headed in. This information translates to identifying workforce challenges and making data-driven decisions that will keep your workforce happy, engaged, and productive. 

Workforce Analytics Examples and Applications

There are numerous ways in which workforce analytics can be applied to your organization. Each organization likely has unique use cases based on its specific operations and infrastructure. The flexibility of workforce analytics can open up new opportunities to see your organization in a new light or make comparisons that weren’t possible before.

Let’s take a look at some common examples of how workforce analytics can be applied in real-life scenarios for behavioral health and human services organizations.

Recruiting

Recruiting is a top priority among behavioral health and human services executives, and this industry often struggles with higher-than-average turnover rates and difficulty finding qualified applicants. 

As such, this information can be used to estimate the cost and time associated with filling an open position and help plan for the future. Higher costs and more time — or data showing increases in these areas over time — can indicate the need to improve your recruiting strategy. 

Workforce analytics can give insights into various key hiring metrics, including: 

• Time to hire: Find out how long it’s taking to fill an open role. Lengthy time-to-hire rates often indicate that an organization has trouble reaching the right candidates or that the current hiring workflows are inefficient.
• Daily lost revenue: Calculate how much revenue the business is missing out on while a revenue-generating role is left unfilled.
• Recruiting diversity: Review applicant and new hire demographic data to understand whether you’re reaching a diverse pool of applicants — and if there may be any unconscious bias occurring during the hiring process. For example, is the company reaching diverse applicants but only letting through candidates from certain backgrounds due to implicit bias from hiring managers?
• New hire turnover: Measure the turnover of new hires during a set period, such as 90 days, six months, or the first year after hire. If new hire turnover is high, there’s likely a problem with the organization’s recruiting and onboarding processes. Diving deeper into the data to identify common drop-off points can be a great way to better understand how to improve HR processes and encourage new hire retention.

Some workforce analytics software also includes predictive analytics. These can forecast future hiring needs or labor budgets to anticipate upcoming recruiting requirements and help workforce planning.

Performance Management

Off the top of your head, can you name the top performers on your team? At a smaller organization, you may be able to answer this fairly easily and on a personal level. But as companies increase in headcount and complexity, having some data behind employee performance can help. Workforce analytics provide important insight into KPIs and other goal-tracking metrics.

Some common talent management metrics you may want to track include:

• Performance appraisals: Track trends in performance ratings to identify areas where additional support or resources may be needed.
• Training completion status: Track participation in learning and development courses or other offerings. This will help you understand where you may need to nudge team members to finish assignments, what your team is most interested in learning about, and how to improve your L&D strategy. 
• Productivity metrics: The exact HR analytics used to measure performance will vary based on the organization, department, and role. Some common practices include measuring revenue per employee or benchmarking the output of top performers to create a baseline to measure your overall team’s productivity.

Employee Engagement and Retention

Employee engagement and retention go hand-in-hand with recruiting: once you have the right person in the right role, you want to keep them there. This is particularly critical (and challenging) for behavioral health and human services as staffing shortages continue rising and providers experience increased demand for services.

Has your retention rate (or turnover rate) gone up or down over the last quarter or two? If turnover has started increasing, knowing about it sooner rather than later can help. It might be time to run a feedback survey to see what employees want and need — and use that information to help with your retention efforts. It may be that the simplest change can make a big difference.

In addition to custom data points that organizations can collect through employee surveys, these metrics are often used to measure employee engagement or predict turnover:

• Employee attendance: Analyze time-tracking data to better understand issues like increased tardiness and absenteeism that often reflect a lack of employee engagement.
• Employee turnover rate: Find out what percentage of your staff leaves within a given time frame.
• Retention rate per team: Analyzing retention by department, location, or manager can help unveil key insights about what may be driving organizational turnover.

Why Do Organizations Need Workforce Analytics Software?

Imagine calculating just a handful of the workforce metrics we’ve explored by hand. The complexity and time required to aggregate the data and make those calculations would be astronomical. And by the time you had the numbers drawn up to start looking for insights, your data would already be outdated. 

Even with a dedicated data scientist on board, getting the right information to the right people poses yet another challenge. Finance may want information on the efficiency of a specific program, the HR department may want to know how to improve the employee experience, and Operations may want to know how effective a newly implemented process has been.

To get the right information at the right time in front of the right people, you need the right workforce analytics software. This is software specifically designed to automate workforce data collection, provide a means for running reports to pull up the specific data you want and present it in a way that’s easy to understand through clear reporting and data visualization. 

Workforce analytics software enables leaders from each department of the organization to pull up the specific information they need, at will, without having to sit down with an expert just to understand what they’re looking at. This allows for better decision-making and more efficient employee management without the need for manual data analysis.

Holistic HCM Solution vs. Standalone Workforce Analytics Software

While you may be able to find standalone software packages solely dedicated to workforce analytics, a better option could be found within your human capital management system. Your HCM system is already where a lot of employee data is stored, so it makes sense that this is where you want your workforce analytics to live. 

A smartly designed HCM platform will have workforce analytics tools built in, working seamlessly as part of the system to draw the data you need from a single source of truth. And since it’s built-in, there’s no risk of missing or misreading data points — and there’s no need for redundant data entry into a separate analytics platform.

An all-in-one solution will also offer faster, real-time data insights. Without compiling information from several data sources to run a report, you can access reporting on the spot to make prompt data-driven business decisions.

Unlock Actionable Insights With the Right Analytics Solution 

The right workforce analytics software can help you make more informed decisions, recruit and retain top talent, engage employees, and ensure more productive work days. To that end, ContinuumCloud provides a fully unified, cloud-based HCM platform tailored to the unique demands of behavioral health and human services organizations. More than that, it encompasses all of your workforce analytics needs alongside core HR features.

The business intelligence features of ContinuumCloud’s HCM solution enable you to combine HR data from multiple sources and run reports that pull up the information you need, whether you’re looking for the bird’s-eye-view big picture analytics or the drill-down reporting to dig into the details. 

The reporting capabilities include easy-to-read dashboards that quickly show you organizational trends like turnover and recruiting efficiency. You can also view total compensation reports, compare budgeted versus actual costs, and run custom reports with ease. Moreover, because the system is fully unified, all your data is in one place to offer a single source of truth for your organization.

As a built-in key feature of ContinuumCloud’s unified platform, workforce analytics are always available and accessible no matter how far back into the data you wish to go. The data systems can integrate seamlessly with your EHR and General Ledger for even more robust reporting options.

Connect with us today to learn more about how ContinuumCloud can help you leverage workforce analytics for a stronger, more engaged, and productive workforce.