The future of workforce analytics: Is your company prepared?
With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that expectations for improved workforce analytics are increasing. Forward-looking companies don’t want to reflect on success any longer – they want analytics that allow them to predict potential.
Yet, while there is a universal business desire for more predictive, insightful analytics, few organisations have been able to implement it.
Evolving reliance on contingent workforces, combined with a persistent global talent shortage, is driving the need to make informed workforce decisions to better serve an organisation’s short- and long-term needs.
Employers want to access analytics that allow them to predict potential. They want to know what limits it, what nurtures it, and what makes that potential thrive. However, despite this, many organisations continue to rely on transactional level data that provides metrics on what is happening – but not on why or how.
Actionable business intelligence
The journey to better analytics is evolving. However, there are steps that organisations can take to increase their ability to generate more meaningful insights.
The fundamental aspects of workforce decision-making – who, what, when, where, how and why – have remained relatively unchanged over recent years. What has changed, however, is the sheer volume of information at organisations’ fingertips.
It’s vital that businesses filter out the noise and focus on measuring and benchmarking what really matters. Understanding what is actionable, what drives decision making and what has an impact on your business enables the shift from measuring what is ‘good to know’ to what you ‘need to know’ in a meaningful way.
Furthermore, often in-house data is based on a company’s own definitions of metrics and measurement. This allows them to measure internal progress over time, but it doesn’t take into account shifts in the wider competitive environment. Standardising definitions and data in line with industry standards enables benchmarking for more meaningful ‘apples to apples’ comparisons.
Improving your approach to data analytics in this way will provide actionable business intelligence. It enables businesses to seamlessly integrate contingent workforce planning into their wider talent strategy – inevitably leading to significant competitive advantage.
Enabling the journey towards workforce analytics 2.0
TAPFIN has demonstrated proven ability to drive strategic improvements through customised workforce and talent analytics. As organisations demand more sophisticated, relevant insights into their workforce, TAPFIN’s capabilities include:
Reporting and Analytics Engine
Through the Reporting and Analytics Engine (RAE), TAPFIN draws on multiple client data-sets and sources to standardise data in a way that allows for benchmarking across industries, regions or companies with comparable workforce needs. It also enables the creation and calculation of insightful metrics that have a more relative impact on the overall cost and productivity of a workforce.
Contingent Workforce Index
TAPFIN’s Contingent Workforce Index (CWI) compiles more than 50 key data points around the availability, cost efficiency, regulation and productivity of contingent workforces in 75 countries. It provides a comparison of the relative opportunities of entering one labour market over another, and allows an organisation to weight factors based on their strategic priorities.
For more information on our ability to turn insights into actionable recommendations, please contact [email protected]
This article first appeared in the sixth edition of The Human Age newspaper.
