Managing performance and developing employees is a crucial component of any business. Performance management can be a comprehensive term describing the practice that drives decisions about performance, remuneration, disciplinary procedure, terminations and development needs within an organisation. However, in existing systems it can often be time consuming to track trends and factors affecting performance such as engagement and other underlying factors.
The intelliHR Analytics section lets you track your performance statistics at the click of a button, based on live data as well as allowing you to cross filter your data against important metrics in order to drill deeper to the cause of any performance issues in your organisation.
This article aims to provide some general context around performance and the impact it can have on your business, as well as how to best use the intelliHR Analytics tools to equip you with actionable data to make effective HRM decisions.
Why is monitoring performance important?
Pro-active, not reactive. The goal of performance management should be to help you improve organisational, functional, team and individual performances. However, often time and associated cost spent managing performance issues go unrecorded, making it difficult to provide the right information at the right time to your key decision makers in order to strategically tackle the issue. Simply responding to an issue or an established trend does not help you plan, monitor and review these performances proactively, and as a consequence can lead to a misalignment of organisational and individual objectives. With ever-increasing competition, it is important to establish a culture of high performance and align your resources to maximise performance; to do this, real-time live data needs to be visible and easy to access so that HRM can focus, on the present and future.
Performance category trends can highlight underlying factors affecting performance. When performance data is combined with other key metrics such as business unit, pay grade or FTE, it can diagnose more serious underlying issues within an organisation.
For example, if employees in a specific business unit or location are consistently failing to meet minimum expectations, it could suggest cultural issues within the business unit or a misalignment of expectations held across locations and units.
Not all performance management is negative. As part of the performance management employed by businesses, it's important to remember that not all performance management is negative. Employee recognition delivered through tools such as Diary Notes can ensure a positive, productive and innovative organisational climate. Action plans as part of a performance management issues can also be used to recognise actions, behaviours and approaches that you want to foster and reinforce while moving forward.
How can intelliHR Analytics improve performance in my business?
While being aware of emerging trends in performance management issues in your business is a great first step, awareness of the trends is only part of the story. For example, cross-filtering expectations data with complementary metrics such as pay grade, business unit and FTE allows you to drill deeper into potential causes of those trends.
Similarly, being able to quantify the time expense of performance issues and diary notes at a glance can identify common themes across the business. However, going one step further, once filtered on the most prevalent themes, links back to the specific performance issues on an employee's record will allow you to delve deeper into the specific issues at the root of the trend, helping you to uncover any underlying factors that may be negatively affecting performance. The advantage of being able to access both the surface trends and the underlying data that has led to those trends is that this information will equip you with both easy to understand big data and specific cases related to the data to share with key decision makers at the right time, allowing you to focus on more directed strategic decisions to increase performance.
Traditionally these insights were hindered by gathering and examining data, that following their analysis, had become data about the past. Without extensive data handling, this information served only as a snapshot of a specific issue in the past with no capacity to factor in changes implemented in the business following the original data capture, and therefore did not provide a platform for HRM to act proactively to improve performance; strategically planning, monitoring and reviewing performance.
As previously discussed, simply reacting to performance management issues can seriously hinder the business' ability to execute their strategic and operational goals, so to be able to observe trends and proactively resolve issues before they become more serious is a significant competitive advantage.
Happy employees are productive employees!
It would not be controversial to state that happier employees are more likely to go the extra mile, and be at their most productive for their employer when they feel valued and appreciated. Sometimes it can be tempting to focus solely on the productivity of employees, while only taking a cursory glance at their engagement and specifically the happiness of the employee.
Happiness is the measurement of employee happiness over time using the NPS framework. Data is also collected from the happiness text that is defined as the feedback following the happiness rating and is an important tool in your ability to constantly be aware of employee engagement over time.
Through monitoring and acting on happiness trends within your business there is a unique opportunity to make data-led decisions regarding the most effective approaches for managing people and creating a productive environment, including the type of rewards that will make your employees the happiest. Note, employee engagement and happiness seldom offer up a one size fits all solution and as such it is important to be able dive deeper into the analytics and directly access the feedback related to happiness to respond appropriately.
For example, if the happiness rating of a specific business unit has dropped significantly over a period of time being able to filter on that business unit and analyse the feedback being reported strengthens the ability of the business to take steps to resolve any common issues reported before they escalate and begin affecting other business units.
Performance Analytics:
The intelliHR platform has a suite of analytics reports dedicated to performance, allowing you to drill deeper into any patterns that may exist within your business.
Happiness
Happiness focuses on employees' happiness using the the average happiness framework over time. Data is collected from the Happiness Rating and Happiness text found in both the Check-In and Self Assessment form designs.
How is the average happiness framework used in the Happiness analytics? In both the Check-In and the Self-Assessment form design, respondents are asked to rate their happiness against their job role on a scale of 1-10. Their responses to this question provides the basis of the happiness report. The happiness scale is effective because it applies psychological reasoning behind why a person selected a particular number across the 10 point rating scale, allowing you to determine whether a person is a detractor, passive or a promoter.
- Promoters: a score between 9 and 10 indicates that employees or customers are an avid supporter of the business or product. They are likely to be champions that can have a positive impact on surrounding employees and their environment.
- Passives: a score between 7 and 8 indicates that employees are 'satisfied'. Focus should be on turning passive employees into active promoters.
- Detractors: a score 0 and 6 indicates that the employee could be unhappy or that their experience in the business is a negative one. A detractor can have a negative impact on other surrounding employees, and require a focus to improve their experience moving them into a passive state.
Additional Feedback: In addition to rating their happiness on a scale of 1 - 10 employees are also provided with space to provide text feedback about their score. Keywords are gathered from employee feedback associated with the employee happiness ratings. These are then weighted by significance and frequency so you can identify trending themes across your business.
Using your Happiness report:
1. Reporting Period: Choose the period you wish to report on using the calendar at the top right of the screen.
2. Cross-filtering: You can cross filter your data to provide more specific insight into employee engagement and happiness trends.
- Business Unit / Pay Grade / Gender / FTE: using any of these filters will let you investigate specific groups within your organisation to see if happiness in any of these areas is higher or lower than the business average. Any anomalies can then be investigated further.
- Happiness Keywords: displays a visual summary of the keywords used in employee feedback. The key word analysis tool applies a Natural Language Processing algorithm to help uncover the key words or phrases in text that has been entered in the platform. Various qualitative data including form feedback, comments and notes can be selected for visual analysis. Words that are frequently used and have significant meaning in the text content are highlighted with a larger bubble size to support the identification of trends and themes. The sizes of the bubbles are proportional to the Significance Score of the enclosed keywords. The Significance Score provides the intuition on the degree of relative significance of the keywords. generally, a word or phrase with a higher Significance Score indicates it is used frequently and also have significant meaning in the user's text context. You can further filter these keywords by selecting 'Chart Settings' on the right hand side; key words can be looked at through the lens of their types by filtering for adjectives - describing emotion and feelings, entities - identifying important people, dates and things and verbs - providing information on actions.
3. Export data: you can export any of the charts returned by your filters as well as the corresponding line data in csv format. For instructions on how to do this see, the Analytics section in the System Administrator guide.
Expectations
Expectations focuses on the performance expectations status as recorded by supervisors. Data is collected from the ‘Performance Summary Note’ completed by the supervisor.
This area of intelliHR Analytics section provides quick access to the records of those employees who have been deemed by their supervisor not to be meeting minimum expectations. Trends observed in the report can provide insights into who is and who isn't meeting minimum expectations. However, the report can also uncover instances of misalignment of expectations between employees and management, and also differences in expectations across business units or locations.
Using your Expectations report:
1. Reporting Period: Choose the period you wish to report on using the calendar at the top right of the screen.
2. Cross-filtering: You can cross filter your data to provide more specific insight into performance expectations.
- Business Unit / Pay Grade / Gender / FTE: using any of these cross filters will let you investigate specific groups within your organisation to see if expectations in any of these areas are not being met at a significantly higher rate than in other areas. Any anomalies can then be investigated further.
3. Export data: you can export any of the charts returned by your filters as well as the corresponding line data in csv format. For instructions on how to do this see, the Analytics section in the System Administrator guide.
Diary Notes
Diary Notes focus on the time expense recorded by logged standalone diary notes over time. All hours recorded as being spent managing diary notes on the platform are visually presented in this report. Trends observed in the report can provide insights into common instances of Diary Notes and where time is being spent. By cross-filtering the three key views, trends and patterns in diary note usage become actionable insights allowing you to quantify the amount of time spent dealing with diary notes and, if recorded in the diary note instance, the expense to the business.
Using your Diary Notes report:
1. Reporting Period: Choose the period you wish to report on using the calendar at the top right of the screen.
2. The report displays three key views; Hours Spent, Hours Spent by Category and Occurrences by Category. Any Diary Notes category can be filtered by clicking on the corresponding segment of the pie chart.
- Hours Spent - The initial chart provides a visual summary of the total hours spent managing Diary Notes over your selected reporting period, alerting you at a quick glance of any significant changes in the time spent managing Diary Notes.
- Hours Spent by Category - The hours spent dealing with a specific Diary Note category. If a significant amount of time is being spent handling diary notes relating to values and behaviour this could signify a need to reinforce the company values to ensure all parts of the business are aligned in their values and behaviour.
- Occurrences by Category - The number of times a specific category of diary note is employed may be significant, even if this does not translate into the hours spent managing the diary notes; for example, a large volume of diary notes relating to productivity may not initially translate into hours spent dealing with the issue but may indicate a deeper issue with training and skill gaps. From this starting point these potential issues can be investigated further to proactively manage the situation.
3. Export data: The row data will display both the diary note category and the summary description of the diary note. By clicking on the summary you will be taken to diary notes on the employee's record where you can view the complete diary note for further investigation. You can export any of the charts returned by your filters as well as the corresponding line data in csv format. For instructions on how to do this see, the Analytics section in the System Administrator guide.
Performance Improvement
Performance Improvement focuses on the time expense recorded managing formal disciplinary cases over time. Typically, it can be difficult to evaluate trends in performance improvement issues over time within the business. However, it's important to maintain sight over not just individual issues, but also the culture within your business. For example, if you have a high proportion of low tenure employees you can expect that they will still be in their ramp-up phase, and this might be reflected in your training investment. Tenure data is collected from the start and finish dates in an employee's job attributes and is calculated daily.
Using your Performance Improvement report:
1. Reporting Period: Choose the period you wish to report on using the calendar at the top right of the screen.
2. The report displays three key views; Hours Spent, Hours Spent by Category and Occurrences by Category. Any Performance Management category can be filtered by clicking on the corresponding segment of the pie chart.
- Hours Spent - The initial chart provides a visual summary of the total hours spent managing formal disciplinary cases over your selected reporting period, providing instantaneous data as to the trend of time spent dealing with performance management issues.
- Hours Spent by Category - The hours spent dealing with a specific performance category. If a significant amount of time is being spent handling performance issues relating to skill gaps this could indicate issues with the on-boarding process or the learning and development facet of an employee's role; information which can aid the development of more strategic and long term solutions.
- Occurrences by Category - The number of times a specific category of performance management is employed may be significant. Through understanding the amount of occurrences of a particular performance category potential underlying reasons may be further investigated.
3. Export data: The row data will display both the performance issue category and the summary description of the issue. By clicking on the summary you will be taken to the performance management issue on the employee's record for further investigation. You can also export any of the charts returned by your filters as well as the corresponding line data in csv format. For instructions on how to do this see, the Analytics section in the System Administrator guide.