Big data can make your HR efforts work harder and smarter
HR departments are accustomed to gathering data to track employee performance, but what other measures should you be examining to discover how your organization is faring in the competitive long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) staffing market?
Getting to the heart of staff ratios, staff scheduling, employee turnover and, ultimately, higher customer satisfaction involves taking a look at other data sets. The trick is knowing what information to collect and when—and how to analyze what you gather.
Recruitment and Retention Data
Capturing survey responses and entrance interviews can provide valuable data, especially for interviews that don’t lead to a hire. Are the job postings unclear? Are the job expectations or pay scales off-kilter? Tapping into why a potential employee chose not to take the position can speak volumes about what benefits or job scope elements need to be improved in order to get the best candidate to accept your job instead of a competitor’s. This is where big data can become small data, since local and regional factors—including local shortages of workers with the skills you need—can play a big part in LTPAC recruiting efforts.
While most organizations agree on the importance of formal exit interviews, HR departments also should pay close attention to all online avenues a former employee might use to comment or provide feedback on their work experience. Learn from any comments posted online, including the organization’s Facebook site and the popular employment feedback site, Glassdoor.com.
Not all employee turnover is bad. However, establishing clear communications on performance expectations and having consistent policies to monitor and enforce them goes a long way in employee retention.
Corporate Culture Data
There’s room for improvement at every organization, but information intake at regular intervals on the “vibe” of the corporate culture can provide early warnings about consistent or deepening problems.
“Poor leadership, whether of a business, division or team, costs money and prevents a business from fulfilling its potential,” says business technology strategist Bernard Marr in a Forbes article. “Leadership analytics unpacks the various dimensions of leadership performance via data to uncover the good, the bad and the ugly.”
Since most employees will hesitate to provide their full views on the corporate culture while employed, it’s crucial to provide a comfortable avenue of anonymity for providing feedback on the corporate culture, in addition to the formal, on-the-record avenues provided at each review period. Even the anonymous data can alert HR to issues that can be addressed before they stagnate into staff dissatisfaction.
Roundtables
Workgroups and roundtable discussions that include feedback opportunities on specific issues are an old school way to grab some data. Trust and confidence are big players here, so be sure to offer both on-record and anonymous feedback opportunities.
No one wants yet another meeting or extra “homework,” so provide an experience that takes 15 minutes or less. Create a way for the feedback data to be captured electronically for easy analysis, perhaps on a monthly or quarterly basis.
HR Analytics Technology
One of the latest trends in big data is on the HR analytics front, and the LTPAC market is just beginning to realize the potential of these tools. Forward-thinking organizations will learn to harvest the available software capabilities to create a market edge in the ability to attract and retain the best staffs, whether locally or nationally.
“The technology solutions in this specialized niche within HR technology space are only starting to evolve,” says Associate Editor Sushman Biswas in an article for HR Technologist. “With about three dozen HR technology solutions specifically focused on HR analytics [as of June 2018], the challenge for HR and business professionals is to ensure they have the accurate data available to process and make necessary analytics-based business decisions.”
Technology tools are burgeoning in a variety of formats, including stand-alone software and cloud-based solutions. If you think your HR department could benefit from HR analytics technology, initiate the conversation with the IT department and primary executives, including the Director of Nursing and the Finance Officer.
Big data can alert HR teams to a lot of tiny things before they become big things. Having the tools to capture that data on a regular basis—and the ability to analyze it with accuracy and speed—can bring your recruitment and retention efforts up to speed with larger competitors.
