NEW! WHITEPAPER: The Ultimate Guide to Choose a People Analytics Solution💡- DOWNLOAD
Are you buying or building HR analytics software? Scroll down to read 9 of the most important benefits of people analytics software over in-house analytics.
Our expertise will help you navigate the next steps of your roadmap, equip your team with insider knowledge, and make an informed decision about purchasing HR Analytics Software.
You can find people data in multiple systems: core HR, payroll, performance, engagement, recruiting, learning, absenteeism, etc.
Companies can have different systems for a geographic area or business line. All this data needs to be cleaned, standardized and validated before you can effectively analyze it. Manually consolidating this data into one database or data lake is possible, but it is cumbersome. There is also a high chance of making mistakes. A specialized solution such as Crunchr has a built-in data warehouse that does this automatically. It refreshes this data every day, week or month, depending on the frequency you prefer.
When you have captured your data in a data model, you are ready to calculate metrics. This requires both technical and HR expertise.
Technical experts are required to enter the right logic in a BI tool. For example, for calculating turnover: selecting the leavers (the nominator) from a relevant database, selecting your total workforce from a relevant database (the denominator), choosing the relevant time period, dividing the two units. If you would like the ability to segment this calculation across departments or job grades, that requires additional modelling and logical programming expertise.
Still, this technical expert should first talk with HR about the definitions. Will you include interns as part of the leavers? For the total workforce: will you include people on maternity or paternity leave? And what if they have only been on maternity leave for a small part of the time period that you are calculating turnover for: will you include or exclude them?
A specialized solution such as Crunchr has hundreds of metrics pre-calculated in its platform and has the relevant HR expertise built into the tool. This ensures fast time to value and takes away the risk of calculating metrics in the wrong way.
When you have calculated your metrics, you need to visualize them in a clear and appealing way to HR and business managers. Will you use tables, bar charts, pie charts, waterfall charts, etc.? BI tools offer lots of great visualizations. However, correctly programming a BI tool takes time and requires specialist knowledge to find an appropriate fit.
With Crunchr, all these visualizations come out of the box. Based on years of experience working with enterprise companies, we know which visualizations are best-in-class. Additionally, we have a library of visualizations for customization.
When working with metrics, the question often pops up: is this number really correct? What are the individual data points that this metric is based on? This question cannot be answered with a BI tool – it requires sending a query to a data specialist who should dive into the database backend of the BI tool to dig into it.
In Crunchr, you can drill down one very metric. For instance, a visualization shows that 5 people made a promotion in IT last February. Who were those 5 people? You click on it, and immediately see the five individuals. This creates trust in your data.
When a company has 10,000 employees, 50 data fields and 24 months of history, it already has 12,000,000 data points. And what if your company is much larger, has more data fields and more data history? You get into the hundreds of million data points. This requires strong infrastructure to ensure that the programming logic does not break and that calculations are performed at speed. When people have to wait for their metrics, they switch off. So when building a solution yourself, ensure that you have robust infrastructure with much computing power in place.
When you buy a specialized point solution such as Crunchr, you don’t need to worry about this. Uptime was 99.9% last year and load times are incredibly fast.
Data privacy is crucial. You need to control who can see what. For example: maybe you would like a business leader in France to only see the French data. Or you would like that person to be able to see metrics for other countries to benchmark, but to not see the individual data points. Or you would like an HR specialist to see all the data for the UK, except salary data.
Crunchr is specialized in authorization models. It offers flexible role based and field-based authorizations, and an efficient system to keep those roles up-to-date. Furthermore, Crunchr ensures GDPR compliance regarding other employee related matters, for example automatic data anonymization of people who leave your company.
Like a consumer product, intuitiveness and user friendliness are extremely important for a people analytics solution. This particularly holds if you aim for self-service people analytics that will be used by HR, business leaders and managers. You want those colleagues to find the relevant answers to their questions easily and quickly. When this is cumbersome, they switch off.
User friendliness is at the core of Crunchr’s design. It has been designed with a non-data-savvy user in mind. This shows itself through an intuitive UX, contextualizing metrics through data storytelling and question-based guidance across HR topics.
Technology is only useful when it is actually being used. Each person has a different trigger to use a tool. Some people need to be nudged on the ‘why’, while others mostly require guidance on ‘how’.
Crunchr has researched what drives people to adopt people analytics technology. This has resulted in a personalized adoption approach. Additionally, Crunchr has an inbuilt learning portal (with articles and videos) and a nudging system to show users what functionality fits their interest. It can even push written or video messages from your key stakeholders to the broader usergroup to drive engagement.
Building a people analytics solution requires time, expertise, labor costs and technology investments.
Developing solid self-service reporting and analytics capabilities requires at least two years’ time and many developers/BI specialists. Can the business wait for such a longtime?
Furthermore, next to the labor costs of BI specialists, there is expertise required from HR, IT security, data privacy and change consultants. This holds additional costs and, if that expertise is not available in house, there is a risk of failure.
With a specialized solution such as Crunchr, you are up and running within weeks for a fraction of the costs (less than $1 per employee per month for companies with >10K employees).
Crunchr helps organizations around the world gain insights into how their workforce works. We strongly believe that these insights are necessary to navigate today’s business challenges and the future of work.
That is why we empower people analysts, HR and leadership to anticipate trends, design better people strategies and contribute to a healthy, working environment.
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