Workforce Analytics and the Long-Time Employee: 5 Benefits

Long-time remote employees can still benefit from workforce analytics.

In many cases, workforce analytics are used during the hiring process and onboarding to match employees with ideal profiles or behavioral traits well-suited to the position. Employers and HR staff don’t always see the benefits of applying workforce analytics to long-time employees, but in reality, there is probably even more data available in long-term employment situations that can be applied to talent optimization.

Here are some of the top benefits of using workforce analytics with long-time employees to improve employee engagement.

1. Determining Workable Standards

Workforce analytics can be used to measure employee performance over a long period of time to determine or refine working performance standards that are challenging but realistic to other current and future employees. The data can serve as a benchmark by which actual performance can be measured, and adjustments can be made to fit what the data shows.

2. Tracking Engagement

New platforms are springing up to measure and track employee engagement regularly, flagging problems when they occur, and prompting immediate follow-up. This type of proactive technology use with long time employees can sustain engagement over time since it allows near-immediate responses to problems. Bigger flare-ups and buildups of frustration that could lead an employee to walk away rather than stay and solve the problem can be avoided with the greater awareness tracking brings.

3. Measuring Skill Growth

For companies that have succession planning as part of their long-term hiring strategy, it can be useful to see how employees’ skills have grown and changed during their tenure with your company in order to identify advancement pipelines and even potential for advancement in some cases. Another aspect of skills measurement is to see how successful company-paid training is for employees and whether the training is worth the money it takes.

Better retention is a benefit of using workforce analytics with longtime employees.

4. Identifying Bumps in the Road

In business, there are always bumps in the road, from changing economic conditions, obstacles to growth, and technological advances that force adjustments, just to name a few. Workforce analytics can help you identify how these bumps are impacting your long-time employees and what you can do to smooth the path for them before it gets too mountainous. When data changes, it points to other changes in how your business operates that can be better acknowledged and addressed when they are caught early before they have had time to grow into bigger problems.

5. Improving Retention

One subset of workforce analytics, predictive analytics, can help you see what forces are leading to most of your employee turnover and address these factors to lessen those impacts to improve retention. Improving retention is important because of the high cost of hiring replacement workers as well as lost productivity and other consequences. Many times, retention can be prevented by addressing ongoing dynamics as well as handling issues soon after they arise.

Let Narish help you use assessments to gather data and build higher-performing teams.