Fundamentals of Data Analytics for Human Resources Managers

data analytics read talent development watch Aug 06, 2024

Gone are the days when HR was seen as just an administrative function. Today, HR is a critical strategic partner driving organizational success. This shift demands HR managers to rely less on gut feelings and more on data-driven decisions. In this blog post, we’ll dive into how you can leverage Power BI to track essential HR metrics, anticipate trends, and measure the impact of your decisions and policies.

Why HR Needs Data Analytics

As an HR professional, you have access to vast amounts of data that can unlock key insights. Some of the critical metrics you can track with data analytics include employee engagement, key performance indicators (KPIs), cost per hire, revenue per employee, and billable hours per employee, to name a few. This kind of visibility allows you to proactively manage your workforce, optimize processes, and ultimately drive better business outcomes.

Our Focus: Improving Employee Retention with Power BI

In this example, we'll focus on using Power BI to analyze a dataset and discover strategies to increase employee retention. Here’s how you can get started:

Step 1: Connect to Your Data Source

To begin, we need to connect Power BI to our data source. For this scenario, we have an Excel file containing columns such as Name, Age, Years with Company, Gender, Region, Department, and Status.

Navigate to Home > Get Data.
Power BI offers several data sources like Text/CSV, SQL Server, Excel Workbook, and more.
Since our data is in Excel, we’ll select it, then click on "Transform Data" to clean it using Power Query.

Step 2: Ensure Your Data is Clean

At dbrownconsulting, we follow the “7 Golden Rules of Data” to ensure that our data is clean and ready for analysis. You can check out more about the 7 Golden Rules here.

After verifying that the data meets these standards, we proceed by selecting "Close & Apply" to load the cleaned data into Power BI.

Step 3: Visualizing Key Insights

Now, let’s explore some essential HR metrics:

Number of Employees:

Use the Card Visual from the "Visualization Pane".
Tick the box for "Employee ID" to display the total employee count.

Total and Average Salary:

Select the "Salary" field and use another Card Visual.
Right-click the field, choose "Average," and the visual will display the average salary, which is around 78.1k.

Average Employee Performance:

Tick the "Performance" column and add it to the same Card Visual to show average performance

Gender Distribution:

Use a Donut Chart visual and select the "Gender" and "Employee ID" columns to reveal the workforce composition.

Performance by Department:

Write a custom measure for average performance by department, then use a bar chart to visualize it.

Employee Salary by Education Level:

Create a measure for average salary and plot it against education levels using a bar chart.

Payment Structure by Gender:

Select the "Gender" and "Average Salary" columns in a column chart, which will likely show that male employees are paid more than female employees.

Average Salary by Department:

Similar to the steps above, this visualization can help you understand how departments compare in salary distribution.

Leveraging AI in Power BI

Power BI offers powerful AI features that can further enhance your analysis:

Smart Narrative: This tool automatically generates text summaries based on the visuals and data in your report. It highlights trends, outliers, and key metrics without requiring manual analysis.
Q&A Visual: Want quick answers? Just type your question (e.g., “What’s the average salary by department?”), and Power BI will generate a relevant visual or summary.

Automating Report Updates with Survey Data

When collecting data through survey tools like Microsoft Forms, responses are stored in an Excel file on OneDrive or SharePoint. You can set up your Power BI report to refresh automatically at regular intervals (daily, hourly, etc.) using the Power BI Service. This way, your reports are always up-to-date as new data rolls in.

Conclusion: The Future of HR is Data-Driven

By harnessing the power of data analytics in tools like Power BI, HR managers can go beyond instinct and make informed decisions that impact employee engagement, retention, and overall organizational success. Take our training in Introduction to People Analytics to gain mastery of your people data.