Recognize This! – Linking employee data to business needs lets you get bottom-line value from survey results.

How much employee data does your organization collect? If you’re like the majority of mid to large-sized organizations, quite a bit.

What do you do with all that data? How does it inform decisions in your organization? If your answer is “Not much,” you are, again, much like the majority of organizations. Research conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) tells us:

Quotation

“We often hear one or more of the following responses when we ask executives how effectively companies use employee data to drive better business outcomes:

* ‘We track metrics such as employee engagement, but we don’t really know what to do with them.’
* ‘We collect data on everything, and spend more time analyzing them than doing anything about them.’
* ‘Employee data can be related to business outcomes?’”

So what should you do with the data? Just one suggestion from the CEB:

Quotation

“Link people metrics to business performance and critical decisions: Move beyond measuring engagement for engagement’s sake. More advanced analytics can uncover powerful relationships between employee survey data and business performance outcomes like customer satisfaction and profit margin. For example:

* A restaurant chain found that employees at its most profitable stores showed 25 percent higher levels of engagement than those at its least profitable locations.
* At a retail store chain, higher levels of discretionary effort drove a 10 percent improvement in store profitability.
* Business leaders who score high on ability to engage employees can have 6 percent higher impact on revenue and profits, compared with business leaders who score low on ability to engage employees.”

What does all this mean? Don’t let yourself end up in “analysis paralysis.” Data means nothing if you can’t quickly use the information to make an impact in your organization.

How are you using employee data to make an impact today? What do you wish you were doing?