How to improve the employee experience with people analytics

Published: June 12, 2024 | by Natasha K. A. Wiebusch, Brightmine Marketing Content Manager

Monster’s 2024 New Year, New Career report found that 95% of employees want to leave their jobs. This report, which may come as a surprise to HR leaders, is a testament to why employers need to prioritize the employee experience.

Aside from supporting talent acquisition and employee retention, a positive employee experience improves employee engagement, productivity, well-being and performance.

Whether an employee’s experience in the organization is important, however, isn’t the tough question to answer. The tough questions are:

• What exactly is good about your employee experience?
• How successful are your current employee experience investments, and where are you missing out on opportunities?
• What should you prioritize to get the biggest employee experience gains?

HR and business leaders are quickly realizing that to answer these questions accurately and efficiently, they need people analytics…

In this article we show how people analytics can help you take your employee experience to the next level.

What is the employee experience?

The employee experience describes all interactions an employee has with the organization throughout their employee lifecycle. The employee experience is a broad concept and can be hard to define. To provide leaders with context, it’s often broken down into the following categories:

Whether an organization has a good employee experience depends on how these interactions impact people and business outcomes.

The role of people analytics in the employee experience

People analytics is central to the employee experience because it provides the objective, data-backed insights HR and other leaders need to navigate key moments in the employee journey.

Specifically, with people analytics, you can identify patterns and trends to help the organization form an effective employee experience strategy. For example, by using Pay Equity Analytics, you can unearth pay gaps and other inequities that may be contributing to a poor experience.

With detailed, objective information, the organization can set realistic short- and long-term goals. It can also better understand where the organization stands and where to place its efforts to improve the employee experience.

Once the organization begins implementing its strategy, people analytics enables you to measure the impact of specific efforts or other circumstances that may influence the employee experience.

Finally, predictive analytics empowers you to anticipate potential issues before they arise. That is, by analyzing historical trends related to turnover rates or engagement levels among different demographic groups or teams, organizations can proactively address challenges before they become significant problems.

Enhancing the employee experience with people analytics

People analytics provides the insights leaders need to shape the employee experience. However, the practice still needs direction and purpose to be effective. The following approach provides a roadmap for maximizing the value of people analytics in your employee experience strategy:

1. Know who your employees are

To build the right employee experience for your workforce, you need to understand who your employees are. So, before considering the employee experience, get to know your workforce. Collect and analyze relevant people data and think about what a great employee experience means to them as unique individuals.

Relevant people data that will help you get to know your workforce includes:

• Background.
• Make up (job roles, seniority level, department, tenure, etc.).
• Location.
• Demographics.
• Skills.
• Career interests.
• And more.

Analyzing this data can reveal likely career and personal needs, employee values and likely employee journeys. This process may require some brainstorming. It may also lead to creating typical employee profiles to help guide broader employee experience efforts.

2. Get a pulse on your current employee experience

Once you understand your workforce, you can get a pulse on the current employee experience. At this stage, it’s important to identify important moments in employee journeys and determine which moments need to be acted on the most.

Definable important moments in employee journey generally include:

• Recruitment.
• Onboarding.
• Integration.
• Performance.
• Development.
• Promotion or transfer.
• Exit.

You can measure the employee experience at each of these moments with relevant people metrics. There are hundreds of potentially relevant metrics available to choose from. To prioritize them, consider the key performance areas most relevant to the employee experience. This includes:

• Recruitment.
• Retention.
• Employee engagement.
• Employee learning and development.
• Career pathing.
• Well-being.
• Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Also, be sure to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. This will help you understand not just what is happening, but also why it’s happening.

3. Use insights to set priorities

After establishing a baseline understanding of your employee experience, you can begin setting priorities.

First, consider reviewing each of the key moments in the employee journey (mentioned above). You may have identified moments that stand out as needing improvement in the baseline assessment. You can also consider other moments that have a significant impact on the employee experience, such as:

Next, leverage the people data you have to identify the root cause of identified weaknesses with the employee experience. This will likely take some investigating by your people analytics team.

In addition to analyzing people data you already have, employee experience surveys can offer important insight and direction. These surveys allow employees to express their opinions and offer examples. They also prioritize the employee voice, which keeps employees involved and helps leaders identify the right pain points.

Finally, use the insights you’ve collected set priorities for the organization’s employee experience efforts. Here, in addition to accounting for employee needs, leaders will need to consider what resources they require to execute the strategy. This may include people resources (e.g., who will carry out employee experience efforts), time, money and enabling technology.

4. Build the experience and implement change

HR leaders play a key role in steering the employee experience. However, it’s often other members of the organization who are responsible for executing the strategy. Employees, managers, team leads and many others contribute to the employee experience on a daily basis.

To build an excellent experience and make needed adjustments, HR leaders must be able to coordinate action with other stakeholders. Specifically, HR should be prepared to leverage people analytics to:

• Coach the right people to help execute the strategy.
• Communicate the organization’s employee experience priorities.
• Gain buy-in from relevant stakeholders.

Certain employee experience efforts are indeed carried out by HR. Important elements of the experience, such as the employee benefits enrollment, employee training or the interview process, will require HR leaders to coordinate internally.

The importance of personalization

When building the experience, it’s also important to prioritize personalization. Fortunately, one the key benefits of using people analytics in this strategic practice is that it enables a much higher level of personalization. People analytics provides valuable information about individual employees’ preferences, needs, and aspirations. With this knowledge in hand, stakeholders in and outside of HR can personalize initiatives and interventions accordingly.

Also, keep in mind that ensuring a personalized experience may require additional coaching. You will also need to build alignment with the rest of the organization, as personalization will require additional efforts from line managers.

5. Evaluate your efforts

Improving and nurturing the employee experience is a continuous process — one that requires frequent monitoring and evaluation. So, after you’ve implemented employee experience efforts, be prepared to evaluate the outcomes on a frequent basis.

With people analytics, you can leverage data to evaluate your progress on key performance indicators (KPIs), such as employee turnover rate, tenure, or engagement scores. You can also analyze data to answer the tougher questions, such as why specific efforts performed well or underperformed. Answering these tougher questions will do more to help inform future adjustments.

Regardless of the KPIs you choose to monitor, remember: the key to measuring success is in the data. To provide accurate results, data should remain fresh, accurate and robust. It should also come from diverse perspectives. For example, in addition to monitoring manager performance reviews, be sure to consider employee feedback and employee opinion surveys.

Conclusion

Improving the employee experience through people analytics is a powerful approach that organizations can adopt to drive positive outcomes. By leveraging data and insights, HR teams and other relevant stakeholders can make informed decisions and implement targeted strategies to enhance various aspects of the employee experience. And with a solid employee experience, employers can gain a lasting competitive advantage.