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Workforce Metrics for Human Services Organizations

Author Kristen McPherson

Another year is winding down. It’s a time full of reflection and anticipation for the future. And for human services organizations, this means taking a close look at your workforce metrics and evaluating how to move forward in a new year.

Workforce Metrics to Consider

There are countless types of metrics you can look at to gain a better understanding of your workforce – so long as you have the data available to analyze. But knowing where to begin and what information you need requires first understanding what metrics you want to analyze and working backwards from there. For human services organizations, there are numerous workforce dimensions to consider, cross-reference, and analyze. For example:

  • Recruiting metrics, such as time to hire, time to fill, and number of applicants per position
  • Retention metrics, such as turnover rates, retention rate per manager, and voluntary versus involuntary turnover
  • Productivity metrics, such as employee and team performance, absenteeism, and amount of overtime
  • Financial metrics, such as program/department costs, program efficiency, daily lost revenue of open positions

Gathering the Data You Need

It’s one thing to understand the types of workforce metrics that can give you a picture of your workforce, and another thing to find the data, compile it, translate the information into meaningful insights, and make decisions based on it. Given the importance of this data, finding ways to make this process simple should be a top priority for organizations that want to ensure their continued success. Unfortunately, the reality is that most organizations struggle in this area and typically don’t feel they have the time or resources to straighten things out here. (So if you’re one of those organizations, you’re certainly not alone!)

However, if you’re going to make an effort to gather your data – however challenging that may be – and want to draw meaningful conclusions from this information, it’s important to recognize that data is useless if:

  • It’s inaccurate
  • It’s incomplete
  • It’s not timely

If you’re using multiple system to manage your workforce or you have modular workforce management system in place, it’s likely you’re dealing with data that has one or more of these issues. When data is stored in multiple places – either in different places or within separate systems – reconciling any discrepancies can pose a significant challenge, not to mention a time-consuming one. Similarly, with data stored in various places, it’s much more likely for your organization to find instances of missing data or discover that the data is incomplete.

In any of these situations, you’re dealing with inaccurate or incomplete data, which isn’t reliable for drawing any meaningful conclusions. However, it also leads to the third problem: lack of timeliness. Even if you’re able to reconcile each data problem you run into, by the time you have clean and complete data to work with, it’s no longer timely. You have yesterday’s news to learn about while missing everything that’s going on today. Ideally, to make data-driven decisions that will drive your organization forward, you want to be looking at and assessing data in real time. And any modular system that requires manually compiling data means that by the time you’re looking at the data, it’s already outdated.

Discover the Solution Purpose-Built for Human Services Organizations

So what alternative exists if a series of systems or a modular HR system is simply inadequate for handling workforce metrics? The answer is a unified solution. Unlike modular HR and Payroll systems, a unified solution provides a single source of truth for your workforce data. Not only are all features of the software – like timekeeping, payroll, and benefits – all working together seamlessly, but they’re all drawing from the same information. This eliminates discrepancies, inaccuracies, a time spent reconciling multiple data points. It enables the real-time data analysis that is necessary to make forward-thinking, strategic decisions.

Because of the clear benefits that unified HR and Payroll software can provide, especially when it comes to workforce metrics and data analysis, this is the basis of the DATIS HR and Payroll platform. Our unified solution is particularly beneficial for health and human services organizations with complex organizational structures and stringent reporting requirements. Our solution empowers employees, engages teams, and evolves organizations by providing a comprehensive suite of features for managing all aspects of the workforce. The workforce analytics capabilities of our software are always available in our cloud-based system and are presented in an easy-to-understand format that does not require having a data scientist to decode.

If you’d like to learn more about the workforce analytics capabilities of our software or any of the other HR and Payroll features that our holistic solution can provide, contact DATIS today. Or, catch a sneak peek of some of the key features in this self-guided product tour.