How To Make Planning Painless Using People Analytics

Harnessing people analytics for headcount planning

The “Great Resignation” left employees searching for roles and organizations more aligned with their wants, needs, and goals. According to McKinsey, 53% of US employers experienced greater voluntary employee turnover in 2021 than ever before, citing a misalignment in company culture. As employee turnover continues, employers must understand how they can successfully nurture the company culture to retain employees and foster organizational health. Headcount planning is key to securing an organization’s future, but only if leaders can access the people data that informs those strategies.

Most organizations struggle with planning because they don’t have enough context. They lack key insights into their organization, such as how demographics intersect with employee engagement, compensation, or the review process. They simply don’t have an aggregated, holistic view of their people data. Without that knowledge, leaders struggle with:
 

A people analytics platform addresses these challenges by connecting with all your HR systems, providing accurate data at your fingertips, and visualizing critical information.

Your data is only as useful as it is accessible. By centralizing your people data, you can access the information you need, when you need it- whether it’s annual planning, quarterly adjustments, restructuring, or responding to the effects of the Great Resignation. With the ability to look at past hiring, turnover, and employee experience data, you can make much more confident decisions about the future.

If you want to understand your organization's needs at every level, you need insights from every level. That means asking for feedback directly from employees, not just relying on the information managers provide in review cycles. An easy way to capture that kind of data is through an eNPS survey, which gauges employee engagement and satisfaction. Organizations can offer these surveys monthly to get a better sense of their teams on an ongoing basis, rather than once a year.

If you’re using eNPS surveys specifically for planning insights, it’s worth adding questions about hiring needs and workload: whether individuals are feeling burnt out, whether they feel they have enough bandwidth to do their work successfully, and whether managers feel they have sufficient staffing to meet their team goals. Once you’ve collected this survey data, a people analytics platform can visualize the feedback across your organization and break it down by any number of dimensions, such as location, department, or tenure. When you’re empowered with knowledge about your employee experience at every level, you can offer the support your people need. In turn, this helps build trust and retain talent.

Collecting and maintaining people data can be a time-consuming, manual process for HR teams. Planning goals can get lost in the yearly rush to find employee data, reconcile it across systems, and merge it all in a cohesive way through spreadsheets - all while avoiding human error. A people analytics platform allows you to skip the messy collection process and focus on what matters - the insights from the data. With the right information at your fingertips, you can identify managers whose span of control is stretched beyond their limit, which teams are crowded with the same kinds of skills, or which departments or leaders aren’t hitting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) goals.

By taking stock of your current employee base, you can pinpoint talent trends and gaps, drilling down to look at key data such as promotion rates and compensation — and even do so across demographics such as gender, race, and ethnicity. Did you have DE&I goals to increase representation in every department? Do you know how well you’re doing? The only way to understand the impact of your DE&I programs and decide where to invest next is to take a hard look at what the data is telling you so that you can measure your progress and keep forging ahead.

Consider new product launches, additional departments, and even company funding that may be happening in the future. Take into account internal goals, from your company mission to what your board wants to see you accomplish next. Will your current team have the bandwidth, leadership, and mix of skills to meet those challenges?

For example, let’s say your company plans to grow revenue by 2x. What does this mean for your sales hiring? Do you have enough managers in place to support the new sales hires? What about marketing support? Do you have enough budget to accommodate the hires you need to make to hit those goals? You may spend your time answering these questions in a single plan, only to find out that your company is also going to add a new product to the portfolio. Now how does this affect your sales or marketing teams? In today’s world, business plans change, and leaders need to be agile. This is particularly important for your hiring, which is why we recommend that you build multiple headcount scenarios in a people analytics platform to be ready to pivot quickly.

The first 90 days of an employee’s experience with your organization are key to their time with you. At least one study found one-third of new employees leave within the first three months. And a mere 12% of employees surveyed by Gallup called their onboarding a good experience. To reduce turnover and avoid the high cost of replacing people, you’ve got to get it right the first time. That’s why designing a solid onboarding program should be considered during your headcount planning process.

A people analytics platform designed for the whole organization can uplevel the employee experience by providing every employee the data they need, when they need it, in a way that is consumable by anyone. This includes supporting your newest employees, who need to understand how your organization is structured, who their colleagues are, and how to get their own compensation and benefits information. They also need to set and track their 30, 60, and 90-day goals, conduct meaningful 1:1s with their new managers and get to know their peers.

Onboarding lays the foundation for satisfied, engaged employees who grow in their abilities while helping organizations achieve their goals, so it’s worth getting right. People analytics gives new employees access to a wealth of information they need to be successful early on.

Most organizations treat headcount planning as an annual headache, a daunting process that requires HR teams to spend hours planning to plan because their people data is a mess. It’s located in too many places, rife with errors, and there’s no useful, overarching view of what’s going on. Without the ability to stay agile with their planning, companies can’t scale successfully or sustain their expansion. If leaders want to have enough insight to create and implement growth initiatives, retain talent, and meet business goals, headcount planning has to be an asset, not a burden. A robust people analytics platform gives you the insight to plan whenever you need to, at the speed of today’s business.