Inside the Mind of the HR Analytics

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming

Data is one of the most important resources available to organisations. Leveraging data, can help organisations to develop and create efficient systems to improve their business practices. While data analysis has been used across different departments, it is often overlooked for its applications in HR teams.

As part of our Inside the Mind of the HRD series, Line Vercammen, HR Auditor at Top Employers Institute, and Britta Fischer, Standards Analyst and HR Researcher at Top Employers Institute, acknowledged the importance of getting and analysing HR data. Their knowledge, which was firstly shared in an internal presentation, was essential to this article as their presentation informed many of the points that this article hopes to reach.

We are regularly analysing the responses of Top Employers to understand how the world of work is changing on any given day. In our latest survey and in the validation sessions, HR Auditors at Top Employers Institute saw that some leading organisations are experimenting with predictive & prescriptive people analytics. With this kind of analytics, they get a prediction of the future via data analysis. That gives them more insights into the specific actions that need to be taken to achieve a certain goal.

An important question is if other companies, who have not yet began to work with their data, feel ready to ‘predict’ and look forward, instead of only looking back. Essentially, are more companies ready to break through the wall?

Descriptive analytics are more common than predictive analytics. This analysis tool is applied by many Top Employers worldwide. Already in 2022, we noticed that 87% of the Top Employers are translating their people strategy into key HR metrics (and related targets). This number increased by 12% since 2020 and it’s bond to keep growing.

You can find out more about thie and other trend downloading, for free, our World of Work Trend Report 2024 at the end of this article!

These numbers and their noticeable increase begin to paint a picture of the growing role for HR analytics for leading organizations. The painting is, however, unfinished and for many organizations the painting is something that they are looking to improve.

The use of HR analytics goes across many of the expected HR tasks like reporting on talent acquisition KPIs, but it also can be used in more interesting ways that may include the tracking and analysing the employee experience.

What are HR Analytics?

HR analytics offers a systematic process to drive business decisions about people. It offers businesses a way to use their data to uncover, interpret and communicate meaningful patterns in work-force related data to inform decision making while improving performance.

HR analytics cuts across the business and encompasses a data-driven solution for HR leaders to gain insights into the whole business. For this to succeed, there is a strong need to encompass a data-driven culture at the organisation level. We can see this in the number of Top Employers that have leaders that are committed to using HR analytics to make their decisions about their workforce.

While many organisations are beginning to embrace HR analytics, many are not getting the most out of their HR analytics because they are not yet at a stage where they can analyse them. In fact, many businesses are still merely reporting their data and not taking the next steps in leveraging that data.

This may be because many organisations do not yet understand the difference between the two activities.

The Differences between HR Analytics and Reporting Data

One way to explain the difference is to recognise that reporting summarises and organises data in easily digestible ways while analytics enables questioning and exploring that data further.

Where reporting focuses on reportable data, analytics is seeking to look at several points in the data to see if there is a link and do more work to uncover why the data is the way that it is. Reporting is a full stop, whereas analytics is an open question that can inform business decisions and strategies from a place of knowledge.

Three Ways Businesses can Integrate HR Analytics to their Benefits

Businesses need to move beyond merely collecting data and begin analysing the data if they are to move beyond the what and begin to explore the why.

This can be done in a variety of ways, but in this article, we will limit our exploration to three:

1. HR needs to develop an expertise in their team to analyse the large amounts of people related data. This can be done by welcoming new members in their team that have a knowledge base that favours them proactively leading their team to analyse the data within their organisation. Organisations can also upskill and reskill the workforce in theri HR team so they do not leave anyone behind in the journey that their organisation will undertake in leveraging the HR data.
2. Businesses will need to select relevant analytics software that they will be able to integrate across the organisation. The integration of this software is especially important in large multinational organisations as the data they will uncover may be more far reaching than their local workforce.
3. HR teams will also need to embrace the ongoing and continuous collection and analysis of data. That is because data, and the patterns that can be drawn from it, is only effective if it is incorporated as a task that they do throughout the year.

HR Leaders and team members are beginning to understand that data-driven analysis is no longer a nice to have but an essential part of the business to improve decisions around their workforce.

The challenge, for HR leaders, is to adopt the use of HR analytics in their organisation with the right tools and an enthusiastic team that will lead them to have analytics that allow them to make strategic workforce decisions to improve their business performance. This can only be done with clear insight as they undertake this exciting work.

Learn more about the trends in people practices: download now our World of Work Trends Report 2024 for free.

Case Study: How personalised learning rapidly upskilled the Virtusa workforce



UK Top Employer Virtusa helps clients to grow their businesses, by providing digital transformation, engineering and outsourcing services across a wide range of sectors globally.  

To sustain and improve engagement and well-being in the new environment created by the pandemic, Virtusa needed to reskill team members quickly in future technologies. To transform these capabilities was something that employees also wanted, which led to the launch of Engineering IQ (EIQ).

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• Learn more about Virtusa’s unique Engineering IQ Programme
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Inside the Mind of the HRD on … the employee experience



Over many years, we have become used to data showing us how disengaged employees are at work. According to Gallup, for example, only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their work, while 85% are either passively or actively disengaged. In attempting to convert the latter into the former, however, the HRD first needs to understand the difference between engagement and the employee experience.

Engagement vs the employee experience

The employee experience is a broad and increasingly powerful weapon for the HR Director. It means nothing less than the long-term resdesign of the organisation, with people strategy at its core.

It is effectively the sum of all the touchpoints that a potential employee has with his or her employer, from the starting point of being a candidate to becoming part of an organisational alumni upon departure. It gives HRDs the opportunity to work with the business on organisational design to give a fair chance of employees feeling engaged enough to want to make a difference.

It’s taken most organisations a long time to get to this level of understanding. A century ago, the workplace wasn’t a place people went to to be happy or engaged – it was simply a means to an end.

Fifty years ago, the focus was on productivity, with companies openly looking to get “more for less” from their people. In the last twenty or so years, employee engagement (augmented by attractive benefits and incentives) came to the fore. It is only much more recently that the needs and wants of the workforce have come to be seen through the more holistic idea of the employee experience.

What makes the biggest difference?

Research by Josh Bersin earlier this year “Employee Experience: The Definitive Guide” in partnership with one of our Top Employers, Microsoft, reveals that the modern employee experience is driven by many factors, but with trust, transparency, inclusion and caring to the fore.

That’s why is so important for leaders and HRs to be able to read employee insights.

Among the specific factors that Bersin found, the most significant included:

• A mission and purpose beyond financial goals.
• Transparency, empathy and integrity of leadership.
• Continuous investment in people.
• Inclusive, diversive and sense of belonging and community.

The impact of a great employee experience

Another study by Jacob Morgan of 252 organisations found that only 15 companies (6%) are doing a great job at creating employee experiences. Rewards for the few organisations that achieve this are signficant in terms of business, people and innovation:

• Business Outcomes
  • The successful are 2.2 times more likely to exceed financial targets than the unsuccessful.
  • 4 times more likely to delight customers.
• People Outcomes
  • 1 times more likely to create a sense of belonging.
  • 2 times more likely to be a great place to work.
  • 1 times more likely to engage and retain employees.
• Innovation Outcomes
  • 7 times more likely to adapt well to change.
  • 3 times more likely to innovate effectively.

How to get started

One of our Top Employers, Accenture, published research in 2020 showing that winning the war on talent means that the HRD must improve the employee experience in three ways:

• Co-creating the experience. Customers are regularly engaged re their desired experiences and companies must do the same with their employees. There must be a co-creation of what the experience means, through human, physical and digital lenses.
• Reimagining the model. Traditional levers like compensation and benefits are not enough. There must be clear single accountability for all of the people processes, experiences and tools to achieve the desired outcome.
• Empower both humans and machines. This is necessary to deliver new models at scale and speed. Expanding in this way can unlock new sources of value through innovation.

Top Employers and the Employee Experience

Finally, our Top Employers Certification Programme gives us a unique perspective on the employee experience because it begins with our HR Best Practices survey covering every aspect of an organisation’s people practices. To help HR Directors in their thinking on this important subject, we have brought together what best practice looks like in a three-part series of e-books, Optimising the Employee Journey.