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Workforce Analytics: Why They Matter for HR Software

Data Visualization
Aug 4, 2023
Workforce Analytics: Why They Matter for HR Software

Today, HR managers have their hands on an overwhelming amount of employee data. In their challenge to make sense of it all, they are looking for tools and partners to help them succeed.

Yet according to our recent HR SaaS analytics report, 44% of HR software lacks insightful reports businesses need dearly. Good workforce analytics are hard to find, but for smart HR Tech companies, this brings a huge opportunity.

In this article, we’ll explore what workforce analytics is, why it matters in human resources, and how HR SaaS companies can add workforce analytics tools to their product without breaking the bank.

What is workforce analytics?

Workforce analytics is all about using HR data to understand and improve your staff. Businesses collect and analyze information about their employees, such as their skills, performance, engagement levels, and more.

By doing data analysis, HR professionals can uncover valuable insights and drive towards employee management tools that help make data-driven decisions.. Imagine you’re the HR manager of a large corporate enterprise. With intuitive, visual reports, you can identify which areas of your organization need more support, predict future talent needs, or even find ways to boost employee productivity and satisfaction.

Workforce analysis is helpful to understand your staff’s workflows better, so you can create a happier, more productive workplace for everyone.

Benefits of workforce analytics

With the right workforce data at hand, HR departments are more informed and confident in their decision-making. When problems occur, modern workforce analytics software can reveal points of improvement proactively. By analyzing historical data about employee hours, overtime and time tracking, productivity, satisfaction and recruitment metrics, staffing teams can drive better business outcomes on many fronts.

Workforce planning

Workforce planning software like time tracking tools or workforce management tools offer insights into which employees are available, how much overtime they’ve worked, which employees live closest to the job location, etc. This makes it much easier to plan your workforce in the most effective way.

Talent management

People analytics are a great help for talent management. Keeping track of your employee turnover rate, time to hire, hiring costs and employee performance will help you manage your top talent.

Employee engagement and employee retention

Just like measuring NPS, business leaders can conduct employee surveys to measure happiness on the work floor. Measuring employee satisfaction against industry benchmarks will help businesses take the right actions to boost employee experience.

Cost reduction

For many businesses, human capital is one of the biggest expenses. With a good view on financial metrics, business leaders can cut unnecessary costs by automating processes, cutting outsourcing costs, promoting internally, and effective forecasting. They can also make more cost-effective hiring decisions; they may find that hiring internationally using remote onboarding software is more affordable than recruiting locally, for example.

Importance of HR analytics for SaaS products

HR software vendors are sitting on a pile of people data of immense value to their customers. But data collection is only one piece of the puzzle. Are they using that data to its full potential? To find out, we interviewed 20 HR tech companies.

Almost half of the companies interviewed have added HR usage statistics to their platform as a strategic company decision. On the other hand, 33% said they add reporting because their customers are asking for it. 

Quote about user demand for HR analytics inside SaaS platforms
Paulina Król - Chief People and Operations Officer at No Fluff Jobs

Whether it’s driven by customers or internally, the decision to add reports to HR software is usually due to the same good reason. They want to add more value for their clients, leading to happier customers and more product adoption in return.

Is HR analytics a priority in HR Tech?

Among our interviewees, there’s no doubt that HR analytics are useful for their customers. But Product Managers juggle lots of priorities at the same time. How big of a priority is workforce analytics in 2023?

Let’s look at their top challenges and, subsequently, their product priorities.

Top challenges for HR Tech in 2023

Unanimously, HR Tech is struggling with business growth. Almost every person we interviewed mentioned that scaling the company and acquiring more customers is the number one challenge right now, for many different reasons:

  1. 53% struggle to increase awareness for their product
  2. 23% are looking for ways to optimize their business model
  3. 18% are impacted by the economic climate
  4. 6% want to expand internationally

Top product priorities in HR software

It’s no surprise that the top product priorities are directly related to company growth. 53% will focus on building a more mature core product, while 47% will expand upon their core product. With regard to innovation, most companies mentioned adding machine learning and AI features, like predictive analytics, to their product.

Quote on the importance of AI in workforce analytics
Kumar Deepanshu, CEO and Product Analyst at Incruiter

Workforce analytics in 2023: fact and figures

So how does workforce analytics fit into the product roadmap this year? Only 24% mentioned improved insights as a top product priority for 2023.

It’s not entirely surprising if you know that 82% of the people we interviewed are currently already offering an analytics solution alongside their product.

Quote about recruitment analytics inside SaaS platforms
Vikram Wadhawan - Founder and CEO at Vasitum

60% built standard reports in-house, while 27% still build manual reports upon customer request.

Quote about workforce analytics for users of an HR assessment software
Mark Atkinson, CEO at Mursion

Top challenges in HR analytics

For 82% of the HR software leaders we interviewed, analytics is already part of their offering and packages. The biggest challenge they face in terms of workforce analytics is personalization. 44% say they don’t know which metrics to visualize for their customers, or they get lots of different reporting requests from customers.

With limited resources, catering to all these different requests can be challenging and expensive.

Quote about the ROI of adding workforce analytics in HR software
Dhwani Mehta, Founder at Opportune

The future: workforce analytics dashboards for HR Tech

Luckily, you no longer need a huge engineering team to deal with a high influx of reporting requests from customers. With plug-and-play tools like Luzmo, you can add interactive dashboards to your HR platform in days, not months. 

Gone are the days of pulling manual reports per customer. Or the opposite, developing one interactive dashboard with the same insights for all your clients. With Luzmo, you can show each customer the insights they really need by just dragging and dropping dashboards together. No coding required.

With just a few lines of code, even your most junior developer can set up access rights to decide which customer gets to see which data or dashboards. You can even allow customers to edit their own dashboards, blended right inside your HR platform.

As a result, your customers will be able to make better decisions, and improve their business performance!

If you’re looking to improve your analytics experience without spending a fortune, or dedicating half your engineering time, look no further. Sign up for a free 10-day trial, and embed your first dashboard in less than 10 days!

Build your first embedded dashboard in less than 15 min

Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo  or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.

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