Achieving business goals – that is, earning money, identifying net-new clients, renewing customers, retaining top talent and hiring high performers – can be challenging, especially when organizations struggle to be successful year after year. A terrific way to achieve these goals involves dynamically tracking employee performance and work quality, and using that information to make informed decisions that will positively impact the bottom line.
Employee evaluations, such as job simulations, skill assessments and situational judgment examinations, ensure that top businesses can comprehensively measure the business impact of their workforce. In fact, Leaders (companies that successful achieve their strategic talent objectives) identified in the Cielo Talent Activation Index are nearly nine times more likely than Laggards (the opposite) to use sophisticated metrics to measure the quality of their workforces (43% vs. 5%).
Organizations continuously strive to understand the impact their employees have on business goals and the bottom line. Sure, the workforce is usually considered the bread and butter that can lead to growth and change, but how can companies know that for certain? If companies aren’t quantifying or qualifying their talents’ contributions, how do they truly know that’s the case – and what’s at stake?
As it turns out, according to Aberdeen’s 2014 Workforce Management report, a mere 30% of companies combine talent data with business data to measure the impact talent has on organizational performance.
In an era rife with big data, analytics and performance metric , this leaves a lot of room for growth and deeper than ever dives into how employees specifically have an impact on business results. What’s more, per Aberdeen’s Talent Analytics: Moving Beyond the Hype report, “Best-in-Class” companies are 48% more likely to invest in capabilities to support employee analytics than all others. The more value an organization places on assessing the quality of its in-house talent, the more likely the company is to invest in the methodologies and expertise it needs to collect data and undertake a sophisticated analysis of its talent pool. Likewise, a greater investment in such endeavors brings with it a higher likelihood of connecting workforce and employee data to business goals.
Despite the opportunity to accurate gauge this kind of return on investment, not all industries are on the same level. Of the industries assessed in the Cielo Talent Activation Index, Technology and Life Sciences lead the industry pack in Leaders’ use of sophisticated quantitative metrics to measure the quality of its workforce. Why? Technology and Life Sciences industries tend to rely more on the return of sophisticated workforce data analysis – especially as it pertains to understanding where and why employees succeed/struggle.
Talent data and analytics enables companies to establish a stronger link to their business goals and build the business case for talent strategies – especially those dedicated to retaining top talent, hiring high performers and, of course, growing as a business altogether.
This guest post is provided by Aberdeen Group’s Human Capital Management Research Analyst, Zach Lahey. Connect with Zach on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.