In our
daily lives, we use personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings to make our
decisions. And that’s perfectly fine. They serve us well in many ways.
However,
when it comes to improving work performances, personal biases, intuitions, and
gut feelings just don’t cut it.
Data can
improve your own, your team’s, and your organization’s performance; people
analytics can help. People analytics is the data that
identifies workforce patterns and trends. Here are some questions that can be
answered with people analytics:
- How engaged are our employees?
- What skills does my organization need to invest in, to achieve our mission?
- Why are my employees leaving the organization?
A
brief primer on people analytics
Before we
answer why employees are leaving your organization, let’s start by defining a
few terms:
So
who uses data?
One group
of people who use data are data analysts. Data analysts organize, examine,
analyze and use data to draw meaning. They tend to focus on understanding
previous events to describe things that have already happened.