Data For Happiness

Nirit Peled Muntz, Chief People Officer at HiBob on using HR data for employee insights and an improved workplace.

Happy and productive people are key to an organisation’s success. Workplace, culture and benefits all play a role in the satisfaction of employees, but how do you determine what employees want and need? This is where qualitative HR data can play a vital role.

The majority of businesses generally capture and analyse some sort of quantitative HR data. For example, insights on new hires, employee retention rates, staff turnover, years of service – the list goes on. However, only some businesses capture qualitative HR data. Insights into their employees’ thoughts and feelings. What works well for them in the company? And more importantly, what doesn’t work well? This qualitative data based on fertile employee feedback indicating areas that require further investment – once addressed and actioned – is what helps businesses create and nurture a healthy, safe, and inclusive work environment where employees can thrive.

While it’s clear that collecting employee-led qualitative data is something that all HR teams should be doing, it can be difficult to know how best to do so. In this article, I will run through the how, what and why of employee-led HR data.

How:

Rain or shine, it’s always a good time to check-in with your people. One great way to do this is with a survey. Surveys are a proven method for checking your people’s pulse to see how they feel about different topics relating to the workplace and their jobs.

Through surveys, and what I call ‘continuous listening’ (gathering feedback more often across the employee lifecycle) employees are given the chance to speak their minds. To be most effective, companies need to regularly conduct these surveys so HR can keep track of changing opinions and begin to see any emerging trends, both positive and negative, that HR and management may have to respond to. When creating and conducting surveys, HR teams need to ensure they know what information they want to gather, have specific goals in mind, and crucially the resources to thoroughly analyse results. They then need to communicate back to the teams and take the needed actions.

What:

There are various surveys for different needs that businesses can use to check-in with employees and learn about what is going well and what isn’t.

• Employee lifecycle feedback surveys: These are non-anonymous surveys used to gather feedback from employees at different stages of their journey, such as after their first month, then after the probation period, and so on, up until offboarding. This feedback is individual-specific and will make an employee feel heard. It also allows companies to monitor their employees’ experience as careers progress, when overlaid with other individual feedback. This can be useful for identifying if there are trends at specific moments in employees’ careers/tenure where the business needs to adapt or change its processes completely to maintain employee experiences and engagement.
• Employee engagement surveys are anonymous and aim to gather overall feedback on employee sentiment and satisfaction. Employee engagement surveys ask employees how they feel about different business areas and can include both scaled and open questions, inviting employees to share their thoughts. These surveys should be run at regular intervals and tend to be longer in nature. By running them regularly, companies can compare data and see if their overall scores improve or worsen over time. Most companies run these surveys before and after a major business change to ensure that employees have not been too drastically affected by the change. I would recommend that these surveys include set questions for benchmarking and then additional questions that reflect the immediate situation.
• Pulse surveys are similar to employee engagement surveys but usually have fewer questions. This type of survey enables companies to check-in with people frequently and gain a snapshot of how they are feeling with small surveys that are faster to run and analyse.

The easiest and most efficient way to run surveys is via a company’s HR platform. For example, at HiBob, we include surveys on our HCM ‘Bob’, which ensures all employee data is kept in one place and allows us to identify and follow trends – making it easier to analyse. Also recommended is the practice of concurrently running surveys on different issues to extrapolate even richer, more actionable insights from cross-referencing relational scenarios, for example – retention data and engagement or years of service with intent to stay.

Surveys are a tried-and-true method for collecting data from your employees, and it’s always a worthwhile exercise to understand the employee experience and create a better workplace environment. By using surveys to continuously collect HR data, companies are given access to unparalleled insights that can be used to compare sentiment across an organisation and whether it has changed over time.

DEI&B (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging)is extremely important for me, as an HR leader and as a person, and it’s becoming  an increasingly significant focus for people in today’s world. If we want to create a truly inclusive organisation, we need to constantly ask our teams for feedback on those areas. Do they feel included? do they feel they can speak freely and openly about anything? Do they feel like they belong to a team? and more. The feedback and insights can enable us to identify areas for improvement and assist HR in designing a tailored DEI&B program that genuinely resonates with the workforce.

Why:

Each organisation is different and our HR agenda and vision are diverse and aim to address the unique organisation’s needs. Having data collected from employees helps HR teams to make better decisions, create better policies and plans and improve employee experience specific to their organisation. By knowing employees’ thoughts and feelings about the business and how it runs, companies can ensure they take the right actions where it is most needed and support all employees and meet their needs.

Over the last few years creating a workplace culture where people feel connected to their colleagues and the company’s mission, vision and values has become a top priority, and having employee data is the best tool in a business’s box to get there. If businesses know what their people value the most and what they want from company culture, HR teams can cultivate an environment that meets employee’s expectations.

Create a better culture and better experience for your people:

Ultimately, the ability to make decisions based on data is one of the most impactful components of any HR function. It enables businesses to meet the needs confidently and wants of employees, boosting not only retention, but productivity and employee wellbeing. Data-based decision-making, leveraging both quantitative and qualitative data, is a future skill that every HR leader needs to develop. It’s the key to creating an epic workplace culture.