Quantifying the Employee Life Cycle
All organizations, small or large would unanimously agree that “People” are their greatest investment and the most valued asset. It is people who interact and empathize with customer’s needs, pains, and issues. It is people who design, plan, and execute the strategies with all the needed processes and systems that help everyone to work together in harmony toward the organization’s strategic objectives.
People create opportunities, products and automate, enhance, and improve services. Yes, it is also true that the same “People” can fail to achieve what is desired. In summary, people are the face, brains, heart, and hands of the organization. For these reasons, all organizations irrespective of their sizes, depend on the people having the right talent and skills for everything related to their business.
Yet, in many cases, in the journey to achieve the desired results, organizations fail to understand their people and appreciate their contributions. Often this leads to mediocre or unexpected results. One of the main reasons is the lack of connect and interaction of the human resource and talent strategy with the business strategy. Lack of evidence-based analysis and decision making can certainly prove risky. In the current global environment, decisions about people at any point in time during the employee life cycle, can no more be only made on gut instinct. Imitating what other matured organizations do about their people may prove helpful to a certain extent but may not necessarily be the right fit and can prove to be disastrous in the long run. Also, just staying compliant with the local labor law and statutory rules for people matters, is not enough.
But there is good news! Like making decisions about their customers based on data, many organizations are moving or have already moved the critical decision making about their people based on data and facts. Maturity in this regard is not easy to come by and it needs considerable shift in approach and at times large scale efforts depending on the current data maturity level of the organization. Cultivating this data driven culture takes time. An organizations data maturity in terms of decision making may fall into any one of the below categories.
In organizations (at the top of the pyramid) who consider data central to their approach, most of the decisions about people - what skills and competencies do we need, who and how many people to hire and when, how and where to find the right talent, how much to pay and what kinds of benefits should be offered, whom to promote and retain, how all the HR actions and processes will impact the desired business results, what actions should be taken today based on these predictions and many more such important decisions, are now being done with the help of data and analytics and specifically “People Analytics” which effectively connects the HR and talent strategy with the business strategy. People analytics as stated by Mr. Mike West, is about applying evidence to management decisions about the organization’s most valuable resource : The People.
One of the most interesting aspects about this field is that it helps uncover the unknown or unforeseen issues, challenges and even opportunities. It surfaces insights which were never known before and hence allows making better decisions about people. The actions thus taken by the business and HR become more meaningful within the context of achieving the desired business objectives.
The field of people analytics is a vast and continuously evolving discipline. It needs data maturity, proper planning and needs involvement from stakeholders at multiple levels. But when understood, applied, and executed correctly, it enables businesses to realize how is value being created and where and which areas of people management to focus on and which ones to leave out as those although sound important, may not be significant to achieve the desired business results.
As mentioned earlier, people analytics connects the HR and talent strategy of the organization with the business strategy by helping to identify or uncovering people related problems. HR and Talent teams can make necessary changes to the processes, policies, and procedures to align with the business needs. Measuring the effectiveness of these processes and actions implemented by the HR and Talent teams, allows to make appropriate changes in a timely manner and verify the impact on business results.
In general, organizations use below five main processes to ensure that the necessary talent is available to achieve the business objectives. All the organization’s efforts and hence decisions about the people, the HR and Talent programs, supporting systems and processes revolve around these processes. All these form part of the necessary integrated talent management.
- Attract and Select
- Activate and Onboard
- Assess and Review
- Develop and Deploy
- Engage and Retain
Figure 2: Employee life cycle interaction with strategy
As seen in the above diagram, the talent and business strategy are at the core of the cycle.
All the five processes are essentially driven by these strategies. One can design, plan, and execute excellent strategies. All the necessary investment in terms of people, systems and processes can also be provided. But there also needs to be significant attention and focus given to measure the outcomes and success of each component and the system as a whole. Only then it would be understood whether the implemented processes are efficiently supporting the business objectives.
To support the business, it is required to measure in a timely manner, how well is the organization attracting and selecting the required people, activating, and on-boarding them, whether the development efforts are aligned with the business plans, are people deployed at the right place and at the right time, are the people well engaged and is the rate of people exit is controlled. Essentially, quantifying the employee life cycle is a key to the overall program.
All employees go through this journey with an organization. There are multiple touch points within each of these stages where an organization and its processes interact with the employee. Each interaction creates data which is key for the organization to measure and understand how well it is doing from the standpoint of people who have started a journey with the organization. Which interactions points are important would differ from one organization to another. Hence what to measure and when also is not the same.
Before quantifying, it is thus important for an organization to map the employee journey. As stated by Mr. Mike West in his book ‘People Analytics for Dummies’, an employee journey map creates a visualization of the major stages and touch points that employees would experience with the organization from the time they become aware of an opportunity, to selection, then activation and on-boarding, into their tenure over possible many years, performance and development, career opportunities, then ending with the separation from the organization.
People’s experience with the organization is not just one-time - only at the initial selection and offering phase. It is a continuous process. All actions and decisions taken by the organization which concern the people within it, impact the motivation and productivity level throughout the tenure. This relationship is valued and is progressive, not one-time. For an organization it may involve high cost of maintenance. As you can see below, people experience thus forms an extremely important component of the overall life cycle.
Figure 3: Experience at the core of the life cycle
Mapping the employee journey and then measuring at the interactions or touch points along with the people engagement and experience is valuable. Organizations are using carefully designed surveys as one of the mechanisms to gather useful information at these touch points.
One of the most beneficial goals of the map is to identify the interaction areas where people encounter problems and areas where the results are not aligned with the business objectives – where in the life cycle and how frequently. By quantifying the life cycle, people analytics helps discover these problems at an early stage. Organizations can act proactively instead of waiting until employee decides to separate and then rely on a reactive approach. Organizations can realize the opportunities for improvement early and fine tune their approach and processes wherever necessary.
Figure 4: Quantifying the attract and select stage, ref: 'People analytics for dummies'
As you can see in the figure 4 above for the attract and select stage (and this applies to all the other employee life cycle stages), mapping the employee stages to the key interactions with the organizations can reveal great deal of insights including gaps and the problems that people in general encounter at the corresponding stages. This gives business an opportunity to rectify and keep improving across the stages. Ultimately, it also improves the overall experience and thus the engagement.
In the quest to achieve the strategic business objectives, organizations must keep a keen eye on the overall employee experience. Because employees move through all stages of the life cycle during their tenure, their experience with the organization hence is also a journey and not a one-time event.
To understand the levels of engagement, appropriate measurement techniques must be applied.
Organizations these days use different measurement techniques to quantify the employee experience and engagement. These include at a basic level - annual surveys and pulse surveys. Few are going beyond traditional ways by deploying continuous employee listening platforms with AI capabilities to capture employee sentiments and measure them using inbuilt analytics.
Better the employee experience, better is the overall engagement and greater are the business results.
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Author
Ninad Ghate
HCM Solutions Architect
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Blog https://hrandtechspace.blogspot.com
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