If you want to really boost your employees’ productivity, talent analytics could very well be your golden ticket (though exercise might help!).
Talent analytics is a close cousin of workforce analytics. While workforce analytics is all about measuring people from a human resources perspective, talent analytics drills down a bit deeper and applies more of a business lens to help you make smart decisions regarding acquisition, retention, placement, promotion, compensation, and/or workforce and succession planning.
In short, instead of going with your gut when making decisions about your best and most expensive investment – your people – it helps you maximize their abilities, which, of course, leads to higher productivity.
Talent analytics answers the following questions:
- Are you hiring the right people for the right job?
- Are you identifying and helping your employees strengthen their weaknesses and build on their strengths?
- Are you retaining your top performers?
- Are you hitting business goals on time, and are your team members able to handle it?
- Are you compensating your employees competitively based on market demand?
So, now that we’re all on board with talent analytics, let’s look at five specific ways it can help you boost workforce productivity:
1. You’ll get democratic, objective information
Talent analytics does not care whether your employees have Ivy League degrees or how long they’ve been working for you. Instead, it looks at merit, social skills, flexibility, emotional intelligence, initiative, attitude, etc. Yes, these things are now measurable – and knowing how your employees stack up can help you make incredibly valuable decisions.
2. You can match talent with needs
The algorithms that run talent analytics software can actually identify talent and match it to your company’s needs. It will look at core traits and personality matching, ensuring that the right people are hired and placed in the right jobs. Et voila, increased productivity.
3. You’ll know exactly how employees are performing
Talent analytics provides you with really useful metrics, like the effect a new sales strategy has on your revenue – and how many more or fewer hours your sales team worked to hit those numbers. What an eye opener when it comes to decision making for the marketing and sales teams!
4. You can quickly uncover issues – and fix them
When a project starts to go awry, you need to know what, how, when, and why things are veering off kilter. If you want the real story, the only place you can get it is from mining the data housed in your talent and business systems. Talent analytics software will lay out the answers in a clear and easy-to-understand way.
5. Your performance projections will be more accurate
We all know that predicting the future is literally impossible, so we do our best to make the best plans we can based on the information we have. This is especially true when it comes to performance projections – unless you have great data, your crystal ball is going to stay super cloudy.
Talent analytics can not only help you make accurate performance projections for your departments and teams, but it can make individual projections, too. Imagine being able to throw the appropriate resources to the appropriate teams so they can do their jobs better and meet their goals faster – that’s the beauty of talent analytics.
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