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Business intelligence (BI) and data can change the way you perform HR within your organisation to improve productivity and the employee experience. Capturing the right data allows you to measure more, get insights into people-centric performance indicators, and helps you to make strategic decisions for your organisation and employees.

Here are three areas where using BI and data in your HR processes will return value:

1. Hybrid work

2. Employee satisfaction

3. New tax year

Hybrid and flexible working

Five years ago, few organisations operated flexi-time and even fewer allowed for remote or hybrid work. Now, it’s the norm. Many companies have employees who only join meetings via Teams, and the strict 9-5 timeframe has been put to rest. In fact, lots of us are probably working alongside a “digital nomad”, travelling the world, logging in from different time zones, and working from cafes and co-working spaces in warmer climates.

This new work environment is fertile ground to start making the most of the data in your HR processes.

For example, you can work alongside your IT managers to collect data on how and when people are working online. You can export and combine that data to ensure you’re tracking important KPIs. This can show you things like overall hours worked, compared against other metrics, to help you determine the impact flexible working patterns are having on your organisation’s productivity.

Has it increased? Stayed the same? Gone down? Whatever it is, collecting this sort of data enables you to you make informed choices for the benefit of your organisation and employees rather than acting on a hunch.

You can also use this data to help shape employee wellbeing strategies. For most people, hybrid working has led to more meetings. This can be distracting for many employees who may need to “get their heads down” and focus. By collecting data from your communication and collaboration programs, like Teams or your calendar, you can monitor how much time teams spend in meetings. Using a self-service analytics dashboard, HR and team managers can track that time and set up automation to flag to employees they should take time away from the screen. This helps to maintain employee wellbeing and keep a higher level of productivity.

Employee satisfaction

Understanding your employees’ morale can be challenging. There are indirect data points that can help guide you, but often the best way to test the water is by asking employees directly. By creating employee satisfaction surveys, you can better understand the mood within your organisation. In addition, you can consult employees on how they feel about organisational changes. For instance, to use the examples above, you might want to find out what your employees think about switching to flexi-time or fully remote work.

This is how we helped a 14,000-person pub company, understand the needs and morale of its staff. Rather than outsourcing their wellbeing and satisfaction survey and data analysis, they came to us to create a bespoke data analysis process that could be reused for future surveys. We built them a process which stored their data in the cloud and then presented it to them as custom reports in Microsoft Power BI. We gave each of the 225 managers, directors, and board members personalised access to the results relevant to their team and role. As the number and type of surveys grew, collecting qualitative and quantitative data, we helped them present trends over time.

New tax year

The start of the new tax year is an opportunity to plan your finances for the next year, including things like learning and development spend. How much money should you put aside for upskilling your employees, and what are the returns on that? By collecting internal data on your learning and development initiatives, you can better measure the return on investment.

Equally, this time of year can be hectic. There are lots of different pieces of data for every individual in your organisation, and these need to be collected and reported for many reasons. Add to this any legislative changes – for instance, changes to tax codes post-Brexit – and you increase the risk of basing decisions on potentially flawed data.

We helped one client update its employee records and tax codes by building a simple app to automatically amend the entries. Rather than a manual process which would be time-consuming, could introduce flaws, and, let’s be honest, is not that interesting for whoever has to do it, the automated process avoided these issues.

Whatever your HR challenge, perhaps BI can help solve it. Get in touch to start utilising data in your HR processes.