Improve Retention with Predictive HR Analytics

Employee retention tells a lot about a company. A high retention rate shows employees are engaged, motivated, and enjoy their jobs. When employees give good reviews on websites like Glassdoor, it shows candidates your open roles are worth fighting for. The company also benefits from higher productivity, better quality work, and lower cost in turnover. So, what would you say if we told you predictive HR analytics could help you increase your retention rate?

What kind of approach would you take in a workplace with low morale?

What is a simple way to assess which employees are likely to leave the company in the next six months without doing too much digging?

What if you had a quick and easy way to assess which employees are likely to leave the company in the next six months?

You have just gotten into predictive analytics, but like many, you don’t have the time or technology to take your data-driven approach any further.

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Predictive HR analytics has been around for many years now, although it was limited to just attrition until recently. Although some companies have been able to get better insight into “attrition” through a combination of data science and organizational behavior studies, predictive analytics has provided a plethora of options for organizations. Flipping the attrition numbers on their heads allowed innovative leaders who want engaged employees to start understanding how to keep them.

Insights drawn from predictive analytics can help guide any company looking to make their current employees happier or more productive. It can also be used to help make it easier for employers to hire the best people possible, cutting down on wasted time and money due to bad hires.

What are some of the analytics available? Leaders need to know how metrics such as mental health, stress levels, and engagement could affect your retention rates. The better you understand your employees, the better you can help them.

At the Risk of Human Error

Often, businesses complete a company-wide satisfaction survey to try and gauge engagement. However, the results of these surveys rely heavily on participants’ honesty. While they’re still employed by said company, it’s safe to say participants are telling management what they want to hear. This data set can be thought of as compromised and employees may not give any more information than what’s explicitly asked. Further, there is a 16% decrease in retention rates for employees who aren’t comfortable giving upward feedback.

Employee Behavior Analytics

Predictive HR analytics helps us determine why certain behaviors happen by looking at more extensive data sets. For example, if the majority of an office’s employees take their lunch break at 1:00 pm but HR wants to implement an 11:30-12:30 mandatory break, you would be able to infer that the proposed lunchtime policy is not conducive to employee satisfaction.

You can also take a more comprehensive look and see which factors best predict job satisfaction and retention rates. The obvious answer is to structure the proposed lunch break around when most of your employees prefer to take lunch. While this is a simple example, this process has multiple use cases. You can use behavioral data to:

Alter your employees’ commute
More accurately, reconfigure benefits packages
Create more productive time in the day
Learn which policies are harmful
View when employees typically leave/ask for a raise
And much more.

Employees have value drivers that impact whether or not they want to stay within an organization. When you analyze those more closely, you can manipulate that data to offer up predictive analytics.

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A Closer Look At Sentiment And Value Drivers

As you can see in the example above, if your company policy requires employees to take a lunch break at 11:30 am, you are likely losing out on a significant chunk of the day’s productivity. Having a clear idea of how much value is lost by this policy allows you to determine which benefits outweigh the time loss.

It’s clear that factors other than lunch play a major role in employee retention if employees leave their jobs at 5 pm, regardless of whether they take a lunch break. The real value of predictive HR analytics lies in that you can now run through a list of variables, including work-life balance, compensation, and others, to determine which benefits your employees value the most.

By identifying these value drivers, you can determine what changes would have the highest potential for increased employee satisfaction. In this way, predictive analytics can identify problems and help managers get to the root of what’s driving people away from the business.

Addressing Underlying Retention Issues

In addition to predicting employee retention rates, if done correctly, predictive analytics can help address underlying issues within your company before they become problems. The key is removing employee hesitancy from your survey process and stripping it down to pure data. What do employees do? How do they behave? What issues are cropping up that don’t line up with policy?

Leverage Your Pre-existing Demographic Data

PREDICTIVEHR’s People Analytics will provide you with insights to optimize your workforce. You will be able to find out which employees are considering leaving at any point during their tenure and which employees are likely to feel disengaged the following year. Our software will provide you with actionable suggestions on better engaging these employees and improving their morale based on the data we collect.

Your company can utilize people analytics too. By integrating disparate Human Resources technologies with PREDICTIVEHR’s analytics software, you’ll skip the busy work of collecting, normalizing, and cleaning data.

Our easy-to-use collaborative software will pull this information straight from the original sources and provide you with correlations in both your turnover and retention. Our powerhouse software will become your single source of truth.

Most companies have a fair amount of data on their employees, including their roles and years worked for it, age, income, marital status, maternal leave, number of sick days taken, and performance reviews. With the help of this data, it’s easy for the software to identify correlations in turnover.

Actionable Insights

PREDICTIVEHR can provide companies with actionable insights that increase engagement and decrease attrition using big data analytics. They recommend that organizations monitor key roles for turnover rates and implement programs that cater directly to their employees’ needs.

Monitoring these key employees will allow the organization to identify whether they are satisfied or not and then provide them with programs that can restore their engagement if they are dissatisfied. PREDICTIVEHR bases the success of these programs on the collected data as well as information from employees themselves.

When organizations utilize predictive analytics and use the insights gathered from the data, they will influence employee behavior more effectively. Through PREDICTIVEHR, they can learn which employees are considering leaving and be proactive about making them satisfied with the working conditions. Organizations using predictive analytics to the fullest extent have seen tremendous results from their employees who felt more motivated and more connected to the organization’s objectives.

For instance, are employees who live within a five-mile radius from the office apt to stay with the company longer than those who live farther away? Are employees who have more flexible work schedules more likely to stay with the company than those who have fixed hours in the office? When properly analyzed, the correlations between demographics will give you valuable insights.

Perhaps employees with dependents on their health insurance take more paid time off than those without dependents. Consider flexible work, personal time, or work from home opportunities to allow them the option to make up hours after appointments, child sporting events, or when daytime care falls through. If employees stay at a company three years longer when they get an end-of-the-year bonus, consider allocating money into the budget to retain these knowledgeable, worthwhile employees.

Typically, these patterns are only detectable by a software application, but once defined, the software can scan the whole database of employees and make predictions on the likelihood of that employee leaving. Providing real-time, interactive lenses allows companies to move away from stale, point-in-time spreadsheets.

Using Predictive HR Analytics to Increase Employee Engagement and Employee Retention

Whether you choose to use a human analyst or predictive AI, the next step is the same. Before getting started on a plan of action, give your management team the tools and support to understand the data’s insights. Explain to each individual how the information was conceived and what it means for their department or sector.

Then, gather for a strategic planning meeting where each person will outline the low-hanging fruit as well as the essential projects that are a must for their sector. Use the data-driven insights to develop an action plan.

Whether you’re using AI or have an outsourced team to help you make strategic decisions, your team should know you’re not making changes just to throw a wrench in everyone’s day. This transparency will let them know actions are being taken and that the company values employee retention.

PREDICTIVEHR analytics can play a significant role in improving employee engagement and employee retention. Take control of your company by leveraging the data you have. With emotions removed from the equation, factual data can be analyzed to see trends. Use the delivered insights to improve engagement, retention, and, in turn, business. Discover how PREDICTIVEHR’s people analytics software will identify valuable business insights for your company when you book a free demo.