What is a company without its employees? How can it meet the set goals and deliver quality projects without a committed and high-performing team?
It’s plain as day: a business can’t succeed and stay competitive without the support of its workforce. Hence, as a leader, you should always pay attention to your team, find out what makes it stronger, and figure out the pain points that bring it down.
Though this task is by far not the easiest one, you can handle it effectively with the right employee data. Let’s explore what this data is, what kinds of data your business can collect, and how to utilize it for positive change.
What Is Employee Data?
Employee data is the info a business collects about its team members during the course of employment. This ranges from such basic details as employees’ names and hire dates to more demonstrative data like their performance results, engagement statistics, and reasons to quit the job.
Let’s have a look at a few examples in a bit more detail:
Employee Data Examples
1. Demographic information
It encompasses such facts about your team members as their gender, age, marital status, educational level, etc. Though this info doesn’t tell you much about one’s personality, interests, and attitudes to work, it specifies a person’s social standing and demonstrates which broader social group they belong to.
Benefits: Demographic data gives an insight into staff diversity. It lets you see what kind of people make up your team, which general characteristics they have, and whether you hire one kind of individuals more often than others.
Demographic data indicates if you could diversify your workforce and enhance business performance by inviting more professionals from multicultural backgrounds. Plus, it helps to build a more inclusive and positive work environment by informing the development of meaningful policies and employee benefits systems.
Collection methods: You can give out surveys to new hires or use an employee self-service (ESS) portal that makes it convenient for your staff to record and update personal details at any time.
2. Qualifications
This data covers employees’ professional experiences, skills, training, and previous job roles. You may want to know how long one worked for other companies before coming to you, what responsibilities they had there, which tools they used and which courses they attended in the past.
Benefits: With insight into employees’ qualifications and work experiences, a business can improve its workforce development strategies and take advantage of internal recruitment.
This data allows you to identify any skill gaps in your team and then address them through the right staff training. Besides, it is of service in finding the best internal talents to fill any current or future job openings and take on leadership roles.
Collection methods: Surveys and ESS portals are in handy here, too.
3. Attendance and time off records
Employees’ attendance records allow you to answer the following questions:
- Do your team members always show up at work on time?
- Do they take enough or too many breaks throughout the day?
- How frequently do they go on vacation or call in sick?
- Which leave types are the most widespread among them?
Benefits: Attendance and time off data play a crucial role in productivity management and absenteeism prevention.
Firstly, it reveals how your team members dispose of their working time and lets you detect such attendance issues as frequent lateness and time off abuse. Secondly, looking at employees’ planned vacations makes it easy to predict your staffing needs, which helps to avoid downtime or excess workloads by undertaking prompt measures.
Collection methods: Time tracking and absence management systems offer an effortless way to collect attendance records.
Using actiPLANS, for example, your staff members can schedule days off on an easy-to-manage corporate calendar and notify colleagues about lateness via the mobile app. As a manager, you can run insightful reports to analyze employees’ time off trends and track their history of PTO balance changes.
Also, it’s possible to integrate actiPLANS with actiTIME to get extra details on how your team spends its time. This hour tracker shows which tasks your employees work on every day, whether they do overtime, and if they meet the set time estimates or not.
4. Employment length
This data includes the hire date and the contract termination date. In case a person took an extended break from work – due to illness, educational pursuits, etc. – you may need to consider it when calculating the overall employment period too.
Benefits: An average employment length shows whether your business has a problem with staff turnover – if many of your employees quit their jobs within a year after hiring, it’s a clear sign you have to rethink your approach to staff retention.
The failure to retain employees may be a symptom of a hostile workplace climate, low employee engagement, poor management, and so on. For finding out the exact reasons why staff members decide to leave, it’s beneficial to get some feedback from them before they actually do that – this info will clarify which problems you must address to improve your attrition rate.
Collection methods: The necessary employment data is readily available via official HR documents: employment agreements, offer letters, contract termination letters, etc. And to collect additional information – such as reasons to quit the job – you can give the resigning employees brief surveys to fill in.
5. Overall performance
Performance data covers the history of one’s achievements and failures throughout the employment period. It includes the goals and deadlines an employee met, their valuable contributions to business projects, customer ratings, number of sales, overall efficiency, etc.
Benefits: Accurate performance data is essential for productivity management and employee appraisal. It backs the development of performance improvement plans for underperforming employees and manifests which team members deserve to be promoted or rewarded otherwise.
Collection methods: Performance data varies in nature and quantity from one team to another, depending on what it does and which industry it operates in. Hence, there are myriads of data collection methods to choose from: digital productivity logs, project management software, time trackers, and manager feedback, to name a few. Try to locate the ones that suit your needs best.
Basic Rules of Employee Data Management
Employee data is of enormous value for any company. It enables you to create better work culture, enhance management practices and make your staff happier. That’s why it’s crucial to handle employee data with care, and here are a few simple rules for how to do that:
- Ensure the data remains accurate and up-to-date at all times
- Apply high-quality data collection tools (and use automation wherever possible)
- Keep every bit of employee data in one database (and make certain it’s easy to manage)
- Track employee data consistently (don’t miss a single team member)
- Maintain confidentiality and pay utmost attention to data security
- Use the collected data to create a productive and positive work environment
- Focus on staff support and improvement instead of punishment
Draw on Employee Data to Achieve Success
Accurate employee data helps businesses remain competitive and build high-performing teams. It is your key to:
- Optimal use of human resources
- Better understanding of your skill gaps
- Higher productivity
- Lower HR costs
So, figure out which types of data your company needs to have, adopt some robust tools to manage it, and analyze the collected info with purpose. Thereby, you will easily identify internal weaknesses and strengths and be able to employ this knowledge to drive improvement.
