With the growing rise in technology applications for the HR industry, HR analytics is now bolstering the trend by carving a niche space for itself among the clutter.
HR analytics is omnipresent, either on the cloud or on a company’s server, tracking email communication between employees and management every second. A new era of HR analytics is finally dawning.
What we generally find is that companies are sitting on large volumes of data without tapping its tremendous potential. Harnessing the power of data, companies can get a lot of learning from the resources that exist within an organisation.
Most companies are involved in customer satisfaction, because they are investing in big data and leveraging on the assets to build upon their business strategy. This imbalance results in a lack of focus on employee engagement, causing attrition and decreased productivity.
One of the HR analytics tool, Revelian Communications Analysis Platform (RCAP), focuses on the communication patterns (not specific content) followed by employees within an organisation. This offers insights regarding employee engagement, tone, productivity, culture and customer-oriented approach levels.
While uncommon for organisations to maintain inappropriate content keyword scanners tracking content sent in workplace emails, RCAP helps clear clutter in communication pattern.
It achieves this by applying a range of algorithms and analytics to high level information. This helps simplify and consolidate measures on areas to work on for the HR to improve communication culture at the workplace.
“We can see whether people are being proactive, how responsive they are, whether their communication style is very hierarchical or more egalitarian,” Peter O’Hanlon, CMO at Revelian said.
See: HR Professionals: Are you ready for People Analytics?
O’Hanlon added “That in turn allows you to identify the future leaders, the people who are thinking of leaving and provide that kind of insight to better manage the workforce.”
Towards the contrary, McGrathNicol analytics tool focuses on specific word usage and applies text analytics to track employee movement, indicate signs of feeling of stress at work, lack of emotional well-being and unhappy work environment.
Kieran Earnshaw, director at McGrathNicol says: “It breaks a stream of text, a chat or a message down into what’s called a bag-of-words, from which we can run sophisticated algorithms to look at the meaning of each of the words in that bag and then look at it within the context of the conversation.”
With transparency in workings becoming ever critical than before, employee emails communication is scanned using HR analytics tools that help track productivity during the day towards engagement, tasks on hand, relationships with co-workers and managers etc.
There are many pieces of legislation that employers must adhere to, as regards monitoring employee communication to include the privacy act and state-specific surveillance legislation systems.
There are rules that govern each company and state regards surveillance systems such as CCTV footage to monitor workforce productivity, GPS for vehicles and computer monitoring systems.
Certain employee records are exempt from the privacy act, however what makes for an employee record is a grey area, which is entirely company dependent.
A written policy that outlines the dos and don’ts of communication, explaining patterns with examples should be disseminated to staff. Managers should make it a point that staffers register those rules on mind during communication. This also means establishing communication protocols for better workforce management, employee engagement and retention.
Also read: CornerStone Unlocks Big Data Potential in HR
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