How to Choose the Right People Analytics Solution for Your Team

The Role of People Analytics in Business Strategy 

You’ve heard it before, ‘Your employees are your most valuable asset’.  On one hand, it’s great to be able to state this with all the vigor and fury of a motivational speaker, but on the other hand, you really should be able to back it up with cold, hard data. 

In today’s business world, HR is expected to make calculated workforce decisions rooted in insights, just like our peers in Finance and Operations. And for good reason. Questions like, ‘Which departments have the highest turnover?’ ‘What skills are we losing along with these employees?’ and ‘How are our learning and development programs impacting employee engagement?’ can (and should) be answered by HR.  

To answer these business-critical questions with confidence, you need a people analytics solution that can help your team make data-informed decisions. Even more crucial, you should be aligning these decisions to strategic business objectives. 

Navigating Challenges 

With conversations around human-centered leadership and employee engagement taking center stage, companies are now heavily invested in fostering data literacy among HR teams. There are, however, several challenges when it comes to upskilling HR teams with skills like data analysis, data storytelling, garnering insights, and aligning those insights to the business.  

Scattered data across various systems 

The first challenge is that people data is often scattered across core HR, payroll, performance, engagement, recruiting, learning and other software. This prevents organizations from leveraging the full potential of their people data. Furthermore, these various systems usually have different calculations for the same metric, so getting the right definitions of each metric adds another layer of complexity. 

Difficulty leveraging data for impactful decision-making 

Once you’ve solved the first challenge, you can move on to this one. However, many organizations simply aren’t there yet. Our 2023 research with HR.com found there is a disconnect between accessing and trusting the data and then using it to garner insights. What gives?  

Time and resources 

Let’s face it, organizations right now are stretched thin. Everyone is required to do more with less. People analytics teams are no exception.  

Their time is being spent running reports, responding to one-off data requests, creating pivot tables, re-running reports with new filters, and even defending the validity of the data when it is all said and done. All of this takes a tremendous amount of time and effort, leaving much to be desired in terms of driving business conversations that can have an impact.  

Investing in People Analytics Software

 

Given the immense amount of pressure businesses face and the time it takes to garner trustworthy data and insights, it’s no wonder we’re seeing a significant uptick in budgeting towards getting it right. Despite many areas of the business seeing cuts this year, Insight222’s People Analytics Trends report found that “58% of companies predict that investment in people analytics technologies will increase in the next 18 to 24 months.’’ 

Exploring Solutions: From In-House Development to Enterprise Platforms 

Finding the best people analytics solution for your organization depends on your specific requirements. For now, we’ll outline the four most common options available today.  

1. Building In-house 

Many companies lean towards building a people analytics solution in-house. There are two main advantages to this choice: 

1. Utilizing your existing tech stack

2. Avoiding a new vendor selection process

There are, however, some disadvantages to building in-house. Among them, the fact that these solutions are often labor intensive and not particularly user-friendly.  

2. Core HR Systems 

Analytics modules in core HR systems are another common choice for companies who are evaluating a people analytics tool. These systems sometimes offer generic dashboards or the ability to build custom dashboards. The downside is these additional features could cost you. 

3. Data Science People Analytics Platforms 

Some platforms on the market cater to data science and IT needs, providing flexibility in setting up data connections and defining calculations and metrics. Quite often, they also offer the possibility to set up your own statistical and AI models.  

The biggest disadvantages of these platforms are that they have limited out-of-the-box analytics and, more importantly, their complexity often limits usage to highly data savvy individuals.  

4. Enterprise People Analytics Platforms 

These platforms typically come with extensive out-of-the-box functionality and dedicated customer support for ongoing enablement and growth. Some enterprise people analytics platforms (Crunchr, for example 😊) are also designed with a simplistic and easy-to-use interface for broad adoption among people analytics professionals, HR, and business managers.  

Leading enterprise people analytics vendors bring strong data security expertise as well. One disadvantage is that there are big differences between vendors in costs, implementation time and effort, and customizability. One must consider how such platforms can handle complex data models, flexibility with features, time to implement, and any additional fees on top of the standard cost.

How to Choose the Right Solution for Your Team 

In this post, we covered the most common People Analytics tools and software on the market today. Still, knowing your options is only half the battle. What is even more crucial in selecting a people analytics platform is defining your objectives and considering the most relevant criteria for your team’s success.

Our latest eBook, ‘’The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a People Analytics Solution” outlines the 8 key criteria that you should consider. In addition, we go into detail on why these criteria matter and the pros and cons of each of the four options we outlined here as they relate to these criteria.  

No matter if you choose to build in-house or select a pre-built technology, you must consider the following:  

• Data integration capabilities
• Ease of use
• Cost
• Time to value
• Out-of-the-box analytics capabilities
• Flexibility and customization
• Security and privacy 
• Customer support

Ready to get started with the right people analytics solution or software for your team? Get the Complete Guide to Choosing a People Analytics Solution today! ⬇️⬇️⬇️

No matter what you choose, Crunchr is here to help as you embark on your people analytics journey! Feel free to reach out to us at any time or take the Crunchr product tour to see for yourself how an enterprise people analytics platform can help you drive better business decisions today.