Everyone will agree that workplace culture plays an important role in defining an organisation’s success. Beyond financial compensation and cool perks, great company culture is something that binds an organisation together. We have heard how Facebook and Google are widely-known for their fantastic cultures, which has helped them attract, engage, and retain the best talents. Needless to say, culture has direct impact on employee engagement, productivity, and eventually, organisation’s bottom line.

It comes as no surprise that Deloitte study underlines how employee engagement and culture issues are rising to become the number one challenge among business leaders around the world. However, despite 87 percent respondents believing that this issue is important, Gallup survey finds that in most companies, engagement is low. With staggering 13 percent of employee engagement, global leaders should take immediate action to address this issue and boost their employee satisfaction rates.

In today’s digitised age, technology supports and empowers organisation in almost all aspect of life. Among other tools, people analytics offers an effective method to improve people-driven workplace operations. Leaders can take advantage of people analytics for copious reasons. It does not only help CEOs make better decisions, develop strategic initiatives, and achieve tangible goals.

As the name suggests, people analytics also help increase the organisation’s human resource efficiency, such as measuring performance metrics, employee productivity, as well as engagement rates.

HR department today is transforming into a data-driven function. As much as 78 percent large companies rated people analytics as an urgent or important trend. However, despite the fact that most leaders acknowledge the significance of people analytics to support HR, only few are ready to meet the challenge.

The Deloitte study notes that only 7 percent rated their organisations possessing “strong” HR data analytics capabilities. This in turn presents an untapped opportunity to harness the power of people analytics.

See: How Can HR Teams Leverage on Big Data?

Then the question remains, why should leaders harness people analytics? How can HRs use people analytics to create a great workplace culture?

Workplace culture is never the same, it has to continually evolve with time to adapt with rapid changes in business workings and set pace with tech advancements. If you think the company’s growth is slowing down, you should be vigilant to observe changes within the system that is demotivating employees, lowering morale and productivity levels.

Low employee engagement, falling employee productivity, declining employee satisfaction, and high attrition are some of the noteworthy indicators calling for organisations to reform their workplace culture.

The problem however lies in the fact that, employees are often resistant to change, especially when they do not understand the real motives behind it, or when they are not involved in the decision-making process.

It is a leader’s responsibility to address employees concerns and take their voices into account. Only when they do this, successful implementation of change is possible. And to serve this purpose, deploying people analytics tools and solutions can be of great help to perform smooth execution.

Drawing upon insights from people analytics such as collecting data through employee surveys and questionnaires, employers can analyse what matters most to employees, measure team performance, and also seek employees’ views on particular issues.

When leaders are able to successfully interpret and make sense of the data collected, they can then work towards deploying solutions for meaningful and impactful change. This will help employees accept and comply with the workplace cultural changes more easily.

Read also: How Can Organisations in Asia Use Analytics to Improve Workplace Productivity?