Unlocking the Power of HR Analytics: How Tech Can Improve Employee Retention

Your organization searches long and hard for the best employees. You also invest in them through training, which includes onboarding and ongoing professional development. Do you want those same employees walking out the door? While some will, no matter what, retention is critical to a company’s success.

Reducing turnover goes beyond your HR department. It’s a responsibility that primarily rests on the shoulders of all leaders. Simultaneously, it’s also the job of all staff members to welcome and support everyone who joins the flock. Technology has now evolved to help HR departments, leaders, and individual contributors in those efforts. Here are some ways tech can improve employee retention. 

Diagnoses the Problem

You may have heard the famous saying, “You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.” Well, you certainly can’t change something when you don’t know what’s causing it. Employee turnover is, at times, perplexing. You see it happening, but the remedies you’re attempting to use to fix it aren’t working.

More than likely, it’s because leaders are operating from their heads. They’re using assumptions, gut reactions, and anecdotes to guide them. Tools like HR analytics go deeper than this. The technology analyzes data from multiple sources, including exit interviews and performance evaluations. Diagnostic analytics get to the root of the problem with a wider and more thorough analysis.

With the insights diagnostic analytics produces leaders will realize why turnover is increasing. You may identify employees with less than two years of tenure are more likely to leave due to mismatched expectations. The recruiting process isn’t giving them a realistic preview of the job. Once you identify the root cause, you can take the right actions to align expectations better from the beginning.

Gives Employees a Voice

Anonymous surveys. You’ve likely filled one out at some point during your career. More organizations are starting to use them as a data source beyond a once-a-year check-in. Some companies are relying on survey platforms and tools to ask one or two questions periodically.

These questions often target specific areas, such as how employees feel about team dynamics and work-life balance. Gathering frequent data like this helps employers stay on top of emerging trends. Although participation isn’t likely to be 100%, a steady flow of information about employees’ sentiments supports retention efforts. If you notice an uptick in negative feelings about workload demands, you can address the problem before it escalates.

You might not be able to make immediate changes, but you can openly talk about the issue with your staff. Validating employees’ concerns is an initial, but important step. It helps your workforce feel seen and heard. Then, you can solicit their suggestions and involve them in the process of addressing the source of potential turnover intentions. At first, it may seem like you’re opening a can of worms, but it gives employees a sense of ownership.

Supports Pay Equity

Money isn’t always the only reason employees leave. However, inadequate and inequitable compensation is known to be a driver of turnover. When a workforce doesn’t think they’re receiving market pay, it leads to animosity. It’s why labor strikes happen and people start searching for better options.

Finding out you’re paid less than coworkers doing the same job or less than you is also a cause for concern. People feel gypped, resulting in damage to the employer-employee relationship. If an employee can’t trust an employer to be transparent and equitable with pay, what else can’t they count on?

Yet, salary inequities and inadequacies sometimes occur because employers aren’t benchmarking the right data. Pay equity software with analytics prevents the problem by analyzing internal and external salary information. This software identifies gaps between your organization’s compensation and competitors. It also shows internal inequities based on roles, experience levels, backgrounds, departments, and genders. You can then apply the appropriate fix.

Makes Predictions

Leaders’ actions impact employees’ satisfaction levels, whether immediate or long-term. At times, there’s a gap between managers’ perspectives and those of the people on the front lines. When leaders implement certain initiatives, they may have the intention of solving an issue. They want to make a positive change and impact.

Unfortunately, the initiative has the opposite effect because of limited data or viewpoints. Predictive analytics fills in the blanks by revealing what’s likely to happen if managers do x vs. y. In addition, these tools identify who’s at risk of leaving the organization. So, specific job functions and departments may be at a higher risk because of the demands of the role.

But predictive analytics might also show high risk with employees under specific leaders and with those with certain characteristics. For example, a company may make efforts to boost gender diversity among new hires in route sales. Predictive analytics could point toward future retention success for these new hires if the company starts a mentorship program. Likewise, this tech may also show reduced workloads will lower turnover among insurance claim adjusters.

Offers Solutions

Leaders are human, which means that sometimes they’re at a loss for what to do. They’re not sure how to solve a problem. Alternatively, managers could have multiple potential ideas before them. Despite the abundance of solutions, they’re not sure which path is the best way forward.

Prescriptive analytics helps point them toward the ideal fixes when they’re out of ideas and unsure of what actions to take. Say you know there’s a glaring problem with retaining employees in a pivotal customer-facing role. The turnover rate among new hires is high; hovering around 40%. And the average tenure in the role has steadily decreased from five years to two.

Your go-to solution may have been to over-hire, hoping the initial bump in numbers will balance out attrition. The data, however, says this approach isn’t working. Prescriptive analytics might say it’s better to augment your onboarding and training program. New hires don’t feel prepared for the role once they’re let loose. Instead of trying to solve the issue with the wrong remedy, you’ll discover what will increase your chances of success.

Using Tech to Improve Employee Retention

Technology has its clear advantages over human analysis. It can take data from many sources, analyze information quickly, and reveal hidden patterns. Analyzing the source of turnover and determining what to do are areas where orgs can lean more on tech. Diagnosing the problem, giving employees a voice, supporting pay equity, and making predictions are just some of analytics tools’ power. Give it a try and see the differences it can make.