Solving business problems with people analytics: case studies

People analytics is the practice of gathering and using data about your workforce to enable evidence-based decision making for the benefit of your organisation and its people. By taking a systematic and critical approach to examining people data, people professionals can contribute to an organisation’s success by creating insights on what can and should be done to drive strategic change.

The CIPD has conducted case study research with a number of organisations to understand how they are using people analytics to deal with a variety of business challenges. Their experiences and insight can help you in your own context to embrace people analytics and adopt good, data-supported actions to improve organisational practice and performance.

Ensuring fair pay and encouraging staff to take time off

Organisation: Barnwood Trust
Industry: Disability and mental health charity
Size: Approximately 40 staff
Speaker: Jennie Curtis, Head of People

Transcript

0:12
my name is jenny curtis
0:13
and i work for barnwood trust we're a
0:16
disability and mental health charity
0:18
based in gloucestershire
0:23
we were using an hr system
0:26
that had been fined for managing a few
0:28
employees
0:30
but it was getting really outdated
0:31
processes were becoming
0:33
longer than they needed to
0:36
the physical admin processes of getting
0:38
information into the system
0:41
meant that we were often getting
0:43
managers and employees to fill things
0:44
out on a paper format
0:47
and then that had to be sort of manually
0:49
entered into the system before we could
0:50
even think about
0:51
getting information back out and
0:56
what we often found happened was that
0:58
people would end up using spreadsheets
1:00
for things so we ended up duplicating
1:02
data and processes as well
1:08
we implemented a new system which
1:10
enabled people to self-serve and
1:12
self-manage their information
1:15
and it's really had a massive impact
1:16
actually on being able to
1:19
have that information in the system
1:20
accurately link to payroll everything's
1:23
all done century now
1:25
and we get a lot more timely inaccurate
1:27
information
1:31
one of the things that we've done
1:33
recently um is we
1:34
introduced a new job evaluation
1:37
framework so that we could
1:38
apply equal pay across the trust and
1:41
really make sure that
1:43
we were paying appropriately
1:46
for roles um so being able to view the
1:49
data
1:50
in lots of different ways and really
1:52
easily from the from the new system
1:54
enabled us to really look at things like
1:56
how our
1:57
historic recruiting processes have had
2:00
impacted pay
2:01
and things like cheeky transfers and
2:02
things like that um
2:04
all of all the things that just sort of
2:05
get hidden in time really and
2:08
so having a good system both
2:09
benchmarking external data
2:11
and being able to draw that back across
2:14
into what we were actually paying people
2:16
and rewarding people in total was really
2:18
really helpful the other thing that the
2:20
system's really helpful for on a
2:21
day-to-day basis is being able to get
2:23
really quick sickness abstinence
2:25
information
2:26
so it's been really um invaluable to all
2:28
in the pandemic
2:29
in being able to access that sickness
2:31
absence information and being able to
2:33
monitor it
2:34
the other thing that we've been able to
2:35
monitor is um holidays
2:37
and as an organization full of people
2:40
who
2:41
are highly motivated um to work with
2:44
others
2:45
and are really committed to the work
2:47
that they're doing
2:48
it's really difficult sometimes for us
2:50
to make sure that people are actually
2:52
taking a break
2:53
um so being able to have really quick
2:55
access to holiday information
2:57
has been able to help us remind people
3:00
you know you do need to take a break you
3:02
may not feel as a small organization
3:04
that you have a lot of data to manage um
3:07
but actually um we find that um
3:10
having a system that enables us to pull
3:12
information out really quickly and
3:13
really visually as well
3:15
um uncovers things that we just wouldn't
3:17
have thought about because it would
3:19
it would have literally been hidden
3:21
[Music]
3:28
before
English (auto-generated)

Why did you turn to people data for a solution?

We introduced a new job evaluation framework to assess roles and wanted to conduct an equal pay review. We also wanted a personalised approach to reminding employees to take holidays. To do these things, we needed easy access to our staff’s reward and holiday data.

How did you collect and analyse the data?

We collected data from our new HR information system and external salary benchmarks. Our HR system’s dashboards make it easy for us to see what’s happening on a weekly or monthly basis around things like sickness absence, starters and leavers and equal opportunities. We used the salary survey provider’s pay benchmarking tool to compare our staff’s salaries against the market.

What did this exercise uncover?

The system enabled us to look at how our historic recruiting processes have impacted pay, and TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings), while uncovering all the things that get hidden in time. For example, we can now easily identify who needed to take holidays.

What action did you take?

We adjusted some of our staff’s pay so that they are paid appropriately for their roles in line with the new job evaluation framework and external pay benchmark data. We reminded our staff to take holidays and now have a function that shows when they last took leave – something we hope will prompt them to take time off that is owed.

What were the outcomes and lessons learnt?

Our staff are paid fairly and take holidays periodically to recharge. Small organisations like us may not feel they have a lot of data to manage. But we found that having a system that enabled us to pull data out quickly and efficiently, revealed information that would have otherwise been hidden. Replacing our outdated HR system with a modern one created opportunities to extract new and more sophisticated data. As a result, many of our HR forms are now digitalised, and this enabled us to work remotely during the pandemic.