Top People Analytics Tools — October 2020

Pricing is typically based on a per user per month cost that is either billed monthly or annually. While the unit price itself varies by provider and based on the features you need, we’ve seen it range from $12.00 - $70.00 per user per month. Make sure to discuss pricing in detail on your demos so you know exactly how much you’ll pay and what you’ll get in return.

People analytics programs offer a variety of features and functionality to help you understand key HR metrics so you can make more strategic decisions for your workforce planning and company strategies. Such features include:

• Performance management: Track how each employee and team is performing. For example, what kind of impact are they making on the company? You can track employee performance through features like 360 reviews, goal tracking, 1:1s, feedback, and praise.
• Employee engagement: Understand and track your company culture by collecting feedback from your employees and measuring how your employees engage with the organization. Administer surveys, pulses, even eNPS (or your employer net promoter score—i.e. how likely an employee is to recommend your company to a friend or candidate).
• Org charts: Create dynamic, real-time org charts that are always up to date. Add customizations or filters so you can ensure you’re meeting your DEI and other requirements. For example, you can visualize your org charts with an eye on gender, location, tenure, ethnicity, even Myers-Briggs.
• Salary benchmarks: Create appropriate salary ranges for a particular employee and/or role, then build career plans around them so you can better plan and budget for promotions, raises, etc. 
• Integrations & Reports: Connect to a variety of data sources (i.e. existing HR tools) to maximize data tracking and analytics, find insights, and develop reports to visualize trends, gaps, and opportunities.
• Shareability: Easily share insights and reports with your team. You can send links to reports, download visuals for presentations, and more. 
• Security: Because these tools have access to a lot of sensitive people data, they offer top-notch data privacy and remain compliant with necessary security and risk guidelines.
• Predictive analytics: Pull data from different HR systems into your analytics platform of choice to identify what future outcomes will look like for a given HR-related category. This is done using a combination of machine learning, visualization, and artificial intelligence.‍
• Variety of KPIs: You’ll be able to measure a number of KPIs as they relate to your talent analytics. Such analytics include everything from staffing to social media to overall human resource management—which you can use to get actionable insights on how optimize your HR processes and find business success.

Demos will provide a lot of insight into how each tool works, from actual features to security measures to reports. Just make sure you take control of the demo so it isn’t just a sales pitch. After all, you want to make sure the tool you choose works hard for you. With that, here are some questions to ask:

• What reporting comes out of the box?
• How do you integrate with data sources / data warehouses/lakes?
• What are they main use cases for people analytics?
• What level of sophistication does someone need to use this tool?
• What data security measures do you have in place to ensure we remain compliant with GDPR and other guidelines?
• How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack and therefore what integrations do I need?
• How will others in the organization use this solution?
• What are the key features I want to ask about?
• What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution

How to implement a data analytics solution depends on a few key variables:

• Existing HR tools. Do you need to integrate an insights tool to other HR tools you use, so that you can centralize data in one place? If so, what’s involved with the integration processes? Will you need to engage your IT teams for help?
• Breadth of features. How many features you want might impact how long it takes to get up and running. This also comes back to integration requirements.
• Your data. Do you need to clean up an old database first or are you starting fresh? Remember, it’s vital to be working with “good” company and employee data so that your reports and insights are accurate. So if you need to clean up your system, you’ll want to budget the right time and resources to do so before you implement anything.
• Compliance requirements. What risk and compliance measures will you have to apply? Will you need to allow employees to opt in to share certain personal metrics? Discuss with your risk, compliance and/or legal teams and check with your analytics provider of choice for their compliance 101 guidelines. 
  

All of these implementation variables should be discussed in full during your demos. That way, you’ll be primed for success and have less surprises or roadblocks along the way.