3 Ways to Use People Analytics to Build Effective Teams

More and more human resources professionals are using people analytics as part of their recruitment process, but did you know these same programs can be used to help build effective teams?

 

People analytics, in this context, refers to making people management decisions based on data.

 

Here are 3 ways you can make your investment in people analytics programs work harder and more effectively for you:

 

Use analytics to build a team you can really trust

You can use a people analytics program like Starling Trust to build what they refer to as a “trust network” which can be useful if your firm or organization is creating a team to work on a top secret project.

 

What the program can do is analyze patterns of employee emails and other communication to actually predict whether a fraud or security leak is apt to occur if that person is part of the team.

 

How a team member handles stress can also be vital if the project is highly sensitive and secret. In that case, a people analytics firm called Humanyze can furnish you with “smart badges” that will track the location and voice tenor of an employee to determine when and where they experience the most stress.

 

This data can be useful in assessing a team-member’s ability to withstand stress, especially if they appear to experience the most stressed when they are working with a team on a project.

 

Use analytics to build the most effective sales team 

The same badge from Humanyze can help you analyze your team member’s emails to see the kinds of groups and customers your top salespeople spend time with and how it differs from those team players who are lower producers in sales.

 

When you take the time to look over the analytics, you can suggest better strategies for the lower producers or pair them with the top performers to learn why they do what they do and how it is so effective.

 

Use analytics to build compliant teams 

In situations where strict attention must be paid to complying with building codes, quality control, or government regulations, you need to be sure that all team members place the same degree of attention to compliance.

 

The people analytics firm Cornerstone has a program that makes it possible to predict which team members are more likely to become non-compliant to the rules and regulations or lapse in their training and certification.

 

Why aren’t you already using analytics?

If these programs sound too “big brotherish” for your company or too intrusive, keep in mind that sports organizations have long looked at the importance of people analytics in putting together winning teams.

 

Yet businesses, just as focused on their bottom lines, are content to invest hours into studying spreadsheets and graphs, but are loathe to actually look at the employees on whom their sustainability rests.

 

It is standard practice for the successful people analytics providers to take the privacy of employees seriously and they have technical safeguards in place.

 

More and more companies are realizing that relying on a manager’s “gut” or personal instinct is just not working. They take the time to get their human resources professionals to gather data, but they rarely do anything useful with it.

 

To keep up in the future, it will be increasingly important for firms to hire companies who can make sense of their data and give them insight into the people they are depending on to succeed. Rest assured that while they are debating whether or not this investment is essential, their competitors are already doing it and make clever use of the information they are receiving.