In the past, analytics in HR primarily focused on tracking basic HR metrics or delivering reports to managers on headcount and attrition. But that is no longer the case. Companies everywhere have realised that there are significant business outcomes when people analytics and human resources work together. When data is used to understand every part of the employee experience, intelligent, data-driven decisions are made.

Why is Employee Experience and Employee Satisfaction Important?

From our 2022 Insight222 People Analytics Trends research we found that employee experience is one of the top areas that people analytics offer substantial business value. Employees having negative experiences with an employer can affect the company’s profit margin and even growth potential. For example, employees that work in a toxic environment with negative employee relations or find communication difficult will struggle to get work done or assist customers. Those same employees will start looking for another job, participate in quiet quitting or discourage anyone else from applying to the company.

Data has also shown, from employee feedback, that many employees report not being highly satisfied with their everyday work experience. And it is well known that employees that rate their employee experience as low will have:

Decreased productivity - and tend not to reach company goals
Decreased loyalty - and tend to leave for other companies when the opportunity presents itself
Decreased employee engagement - and tend to not put their all into projects or services

So, employers should take more note.

By utilising a data analytics approach to people management, companies find greater results because their decisions are based on real-time data, not on gut feelings or the executive’s opinions. the HR department is playing a leading role in the future of employee experience, covering training development, communication channels, hybrid workforce and leadership styles and overall creating a hyper-personalisation of the employee journey in the company.

With a focus on employee experience, businesses are finding solutions to some of the top HR trends people management are tackling today, including the shortage of skills, lack of labour, advancing technology and competitive labour market, all affected by how employees perceive their experience with their employers.

What is Involved in the Employee Experience?

Employee experience is personal and subjective and is centralised by the individual and what matters most to them. So, part of the challenge in determining the factors influencing employee experience is the confusion between experience data and engagement data.

Though positive employee engagement is the end goal for employee experience efforts, to make a real impact, the focus should be on experience data.

Comprehensive experience data is collected information that reflects the reality of an individual's everyday experiences as they interact with the organisation. Consider them as employee journey maps of sorts which help you to understand how to build positive employee experience.

This doesn't just include the tasks they are assigned for their role in the business. It consists of the whole experience from external factors, human factors and 'things' factors that can encompass the digital & the physical, all of which impact employee perceptions and the employee lifecycle.

This can comprise of:

The interactions with a boss - did they solve the problem the employee had?
The interaction with a process - did it make hard harder, creating unnecessary steps?
The interaction with company technology - did it function properly or did it fail – repeatedly?
The interaction with the location – did it present a comfortable workspace/company culture?

How Can People Analytics Help Improve EX?

HR leaders want to create a company culture that focuses on the importance of employee experience. The Great Resignation proves that employers can no longer take their workforce for granted and must treat them like people, not resources.

People analytics can first assist with improving EX by supporting the Human Resources function to become a more data-driven function. Basing strategies and decisions on fact-based findings over gut instinct or biased assumptions will set the company up with a better employee experience framework and streamline the business strategy.

Next, people analytics needs to stay in the driver's seat and talk to business leaders to discover the top business priorities and connect their strategies with those of the business. This is crucial to driving real impact from EX. They can connect with leaders and assist with creating valued methods instead of just producing data.

After this HR can measuring employee experience through a well-established employee listening program. Surveys are effective when the questions asked are specific to the challenge the human resources department is attempting to solve. From the employee listening programs, a deeper understanding of employee sentiment can be discovered so that business leaders and HR can work together to improve the employee journey.

From the feedback provided by employees, companies want to have a clear understanding of what it all means. Many employers will take the personal tidbits of information they gather from employees rather than connect everything to the big picture. With sentiment analysis, the data collected is used to see how employees feel as a whole in their experience. The most crucial element is building employee trust by providing psychological safety and acting on the information provided. This is where human resource management can truly shine.

HR professionals want to understand that not every employee is the same, and the experiences one person or group may have with the company can be completely different from another. This needs to be considered when leveraging the data to personalise employee experiences. The end goal is to create a personalised employee experience.

Collecting The Right Data The Right Way

As Laura Stevens, Vice President of Global Strategy, Analytics and Employee Experience at DSM, stated on the Digital HR Leaders podcast in reference to connecting people analytics and employee experience:

"It is important obviously to make sure that whatever is being done reinforces each other, rather than being perceived as something coming out of a people analytics, something coming out of the global analytics team, or the central analytics team. So, we are creating synergies and making sure that data savviness, analytics savviness, becomes an opportunity that is streamlined between the functions and also the things that are being prioritised from a central point of view."

When collecting data, people analytics can create specific surveys with more business-end data, bringing more light onto the business's subjects or challenges. They can design systems on one platform and be accessible to all, business and HR leaders alike.

This system would then gather and present data so that they don't have to possess a background in analytics to understand.

Prioritising Projects to Maximise Your Employee Experience Strategy

It is wise for people analytics to prioritise the projects they work on for those that have the potential to be scaled across the organisation to maximise the impact they can offer and affect business performance. Employee experience too can be scaled across an organisation. However, it can be challenging to meet all the requests if they are burdened with a "laundry list" of different wishes.

After the data is collected and evaluated, it is essential not to just sit on it. There needs to be some outcome to the efforts. Laura Stevens reiterates:

"I also never start a project without a very clear understanding of the end user, what keeps these users awake at night, and how certain insights will bring change. So, I think people analytics is no longer about doing something interesting, we really need to move the focus to relevance. I always tell my team, insight without action is overhead."

Hence, to empower the function so as they take action, people analytics can educate HR professionals and business leaders about the strategy behind employee experience to help them understand the following:

Why are we doing this?
What outcome do we hope to gain?

This gives them clear, relevant insight to make informed decisions or offer objective advice and makes them more self-sufficient. Because, in the end, everyone has a part in enhancing the employee experience.

What Are Leading Companies Doing to Connect People Analytics and Employee Experience?

Leading companies have been using people data across the entire business to develop and scale the products and the journey they create for employees. Utilising the seven characteristics of leading companies that we discovered in our 2022 Insight222 People Analytics Trends research, they actively enable HR leaders to be more data-driven.

For example, if a leading company were dealing with high employee burnout affecting employee experience, they would act immediately, investing in measuring work distribution, employee support and training available. They would then scale technology and people analytics to collect and review data that shows areas that need the greatest attention.

They may find that employees want better wellbeing programs to support them during times of high stress, or even consider new employee benefits. Or that employees needed skills development to navigate and remain productive even when things were not going great. The company can then improve employee satisfaction and retention by addressing the employee concerns immediately.

Microsoft, a leading company in the tech industry, not only found ways to improve employee engagement but went beyond by considering the entire employee experience and what Dawn Klinghoffer, Head of People Analytics, termed “Employee Thriving”.

As Dawn stated:

“We wanted a higher bar than just engagement. In measuring engagement, often was the case that while things looked pretty decent when we get under the covers a little bit and really understand what’s going on, there were key areas that we needed to focus on.”

Thus Microsoft developed an effective employee listening program that created specific surveys that got to the heart of issues without oversaturating employees with insight requests. They also implemented focus groups for more personalised feedback.

From the information collected, they identified key factors holding their employees back and making things more difficult for employees to perform their roles. Afterwards, they worked to remove obstacles such as poor communication or bureaucracy. Microsoft maintained a healthy employee listening program that has helped them navigate the last few years, which has proved challenging for any company, big or small.

Yelp, a mobile business review company, built a thriving remote working culture when suddenly the whole world was working from home. As Carmen Whitney Orr, Chief People Officer at Yelp, noted:

“I think it was really a combination of first listening to our employees and also seeing what was working for the business, and the juxtaposition of the two things told us that remote was the future of work at Yelp.”

They invested in employee listening programs from pulse surveys, town hall meetings and exit interviews to learn the sentiment of their employees and how to navigate the changing environment of work. They found that 86% of their employees preferred to work from home and had no desire to return to the workplace. Additionally, 87% said they worked more effectively remotely, and 93% of employees and managers stated they could meet their goals remotely.

Because of the work they have put in to listen to and support their employees remotely, Yelp expanded its employee footprint by attracting and recruiting top talent globally. In their recent surveys, they have also seen a 5-point increase in employee engagement and a double-digit increase in intent to stay. From all this, they have witnessed higher profit margins and anticipate continued growth.

How to Measure the Business Impact of Improved Employee Experience

On average, only 14% of respondents from our Insight222 and TI People joint survey were confident they could fully prove the business delivered with EX. This is due to businesses having difficulty proving the positive impact of employee experience. Many leaders report the challenges in measuring the most significant effects of EX, such as increased innovation or faster attraction of top candidates.

People analytics and their efforts on EX is the lifeblood of employee experience and employee listening comes heavily into play here. Employee listening is not only an excellent means for HR teams to collect data on the employee experience, but it is also an effective means to evaluate if it has a positive business impact and has a clear connection to strategic priorities.

Using employee listening, scalable information is easily and quickly collected about sentiment, behaviour, and what matters most – much better than passive data or system data.

What is the Most Important Step to Connecting People Analytics and Employee Experience?

For the employee experience to flourish in an organisation, HR needs to have the mindset of company improvement based on data and identify, assess and place action points on the major concerns regarding employee experience. When HR departments become business-focused, data-driven, and experience-led, they bring people analytics and employee experience together. Collecting, analysing and acting appropriately from data to create a positive employee experience and business can benefit everyone and deliver tangible business value.

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How To Connect People Analytics and Employee Experience