Your clients are sitting on a treasure trove of information that can help them make more strategic HR and benefits decisions. According to Bersin by Deloitte Research, in 2016, companies experienced a massive 120 percent increase in correlating their people data to business performance.
Obviously, merely mining HR data is no longer enough; your clients are expected to actually do something with it. Today’s organizations have an operational business imperative to extract insights about their workforces that are informed by data.
Using an Employee Database to Make Better HR Decisions
An International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR) survey indicates that more than two‐thirds of respondents collect HR metrics (69%), which is good news. It’s no longer enough for your clients’ human resources departments to operate on feelings or instinct; the C-suite is expecting their people teams to come to the table with numbers and objective information.
People analytics drives better decision-making throughout the organization. It can help your clients better understand business concerns such as:
- How much their unplanned overtime is costing
- How they can manage labor expenses
- What impact employee turnover is having on productivity
- Which locations or departments have the highest turnover
One of the biggest challenges your clients face is controlling overtime costs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70% of businesses’ compensation costs are attributed to wages and salaries. Helping your clients determine how much of that 70% is being spent on overtime, and which departments or managers are spending it, can save them a significant amount of money.
If they feel like their business has a revolving door with employees coming and going, they can analyze monthly and yearly turnover rates, the average cost per turnover and its impact on their budget, and identify which locations and departments are facing the highest turnover rates.
Employee motivation and retention is another important area that can be improved by data analysis. Employee surveys are a great tool for gathering data that can be directly linked to other business outcome data such as turnover, business unit performance, or financials.
Using Analytics to Help Lower Insurance Costs
With rules and regulations continuing to change, your clients are likely wrestling with important decisions around insuring their employees in our fluctuating healthcare landscape. Smart brokers are looking to the valuable data captured in their clients’ benefits systems to help them better evaluate all of their options.
It’s important to your clients that they have the ability to access this employee data to develop a competitive benefits strategy, keep their participation rates high, and help ensure they are best positioned to attract and retain top talent. But, designing these tailored programs, products, benefits plans, services and rewards takes time and can cost a great deal of money.
Your clients’ employees rely on them to deliver a mix of options that satisfies their individual needs. You’re charged with helping your clients determine the best products at the best cost. But how can you be sure you’ve designed the optimal package to meet the unique needs of their workforces, while, at the same time, ensuring they can still financially support the strategic goals of the business? Achieving the precise balance requires that you have the right level of transparency into actionable benefits data.
As a trusted advisor, you can help determine which solutions will best complement your clients’ core medical plans, but without thorough insight into how these plans are being used, that’s going to be tough to do. Data analytics tools can eliminate the guesswork, digging into claims data and workplace demographics to help identify gaps in coverage and better understand what their employees want the most from their plans. Having this data lets you develop a highly specific, comprehensive benefits strategy that addresses the needs of everyone in each organization.
Claims and insurance utilization data can be easily appended to employers’ data. You can greatly enhance the service you provide your clients using this data to help them benchmark their plan against other companies in their industry.
By fully understanding the needs of an employee population, you can guide your clients and help them identify the most affordable solutions that will provide their employees with the coverage they require. This information can also help you advise clients as to how best to communicate about benefits to their employees during open enrollment and throughout the year.
The key to successfully managing employee data and building accurate analytics is having data that resides in the same database, not in disparate systems that might have conflicting information. Making sure your clients can access all of the relevant data they need to make strategic, well-informed HR and benefits decisions will help you help them save money, time, and effort. Contact Paycor today and we’ll help you get started.