People's decisions are no longer driven by instinct alone. As organizations grow more complex and distributed, you need reliable data to understand what’s happening inside your workforce and why. People analytics, also known as workforce analytics or HR analytics, bridges this gap by turning everyday HR data into meaningful insights that improve performance, productivity, and decision-making.
Instead of relying on assumptions, HR teams use people analytics to uncover patterns across employee relations, talent development, recruitment, and workforce costs, often through intuitive graphs, charts, and visualizations powered by modern people analytics tools. At its core, people analytics enables organizations to move from reactive HR management to proactive, evidence-based workforce strategy.
- 71% of companies now consider people analytics a high priority within their organization.
- 60–70% of HR leaders rely on people analytics to shape HR strategy and decisions.
- 90% of companies reported their analytics team has stayed the same size or grown over the past year, indicating sustained investment.
People analytics is today’s buzzword and let’s understand why it’s becoming popular.
What is people analytics?
People analytics, often referred to as workforce analytics or HR analytics, is the process of acquiring and translating HR data to improve workforce performance and productivity. It is presented in the form of graphs, charts, and visualizations using data you already have in the people analytics tools you are using.
It analyzes certain domains like:
- Employee relations : A people analytics solution measures attrition data and identifies the reasons why people are leaving. It assesses which managers are attrition drivers and which departments have compliance-related issues.
- Talent development : It dives into which teams have good internal movement, promotion stats, learning graph, APRs and statistics around them.
- Recruitment : Get an insight into recruitment funnel health, conversion rates, hiring stats and international hires and time to onboard employees.
- Finance and budget monitoring : Measure headcount, personnel, general and administrative (G&A) budget planning and monitor spend patterns and financial analysis.
4 types of people analytics
People analytics is a rapidly growing field that helps managers like you make informed decisions about your workforce. It can be classified into four categories:
- Descriptive analytics : It analyses historical data to gain insight into what happened in the past. This is to gain information about patterns or trends like employee turnover rate, absenteeism or workforce demographics. Descriptive analytics is a pivotal part of people analytics to help HR make cornerstone decisions with data collected over a long period of time.
- Diagnostic analytics : It goes one step further than descriptive analytics. Instead of just diving into past trends, it drills down into the reason a certain pattern is followed. For instance, in case of high attrition rates, diagnostic analytics extrapolates why it’s occurring. Which manager is responsible for attrition? Is it due to poor management, lack of career development opportunities, or low compensation?
- Predictive analytics : This type of analytics uses statistical algorithms and ML techniques to analyze historical data and predict future outcomes. It can help HR managers to predict future trends like employee turnover or skill gaps to develop strategies and address them before they snowball into dire outcomes.
- Prescriptive analytics : It uses data, algorithms and ML techniques to recommend HR actions optimize the workforce and curb negative outcomes. It extends from predictive analytics, which predicts what might happen to prevent it from occurring.
Companies that leverage people analytics
It uses Project Oxygen to make a manager go from being average to becoming great. By an insurmountable number of hours spent in research, Google has taken traits of the highest performing managers and incorporated their research into its management development programs. It distills the most common characteristics in great leaders and adds that knowledge in its program to foster high performance and growth.
Amazon
Amazon uses people analytics to optimize its vast workforce. Its logistics and fulfilment centres' employee productivity and safety data are analyzed to optimize workflow and minimize accidents. ML helps surface inefficiencies by analyzing task time and warehouse operations’ data. This allows continuous optimization of workflows supporting wellbeing of employees.
Deloitte
It integrates people analytics into consulting services to optimize the performance of its workflows. It analyzes recruitment, engagement and retention data to retain top employees and attract top talent.
IBM
IBM’s predictive attrition program uses AI to predict employee turnover with a high percentage of accuracy. By gauging multiple data points, its system provides actionable recommendations for managers to combat attrition causes head-on. This is the cornerstone of global HRM, where managing turnover requires meticulous strategies. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has stated that traditional human resources models are no longer effective for today’s American workforce and must be augmented with machine learning to better support employees and modern work demands.
Benefits of using people analytics
People analytics helps organizations move from reactive HR decisions to data-driven workforce strategies. By analyzing employee data across the entire lifecycle, you can gain clarity into what’s working, what isn’t, and where action is needed. Its benefits include:
Lower attrition
Lowering turnover is one of the most effective applications of people analytics. It’s most transparent when addressing a certain set of employees. In case of targeting a certain set of retention backed by people analytics leads to lowered turnover.
Unbiased payment
When organizations use people analytics to evaluate proposed pay, counter-offer considerations and promotions, it can help companies achieve fair pay. It gives a competitive advantage to top-performing employees and also to employees getting offers from multiple companies.
Learning and development
Companies use people analytics to optimize training modes and sources. Learning analytics that connects the impact of training and development on business outcomes enables organizations to ask the right set of questions and get accurate answers.
Optimize workforce planning
Companies that use people analytics can analyze workforce data to understand the current level of workforce and make informed decisions.
People-analytics–enabled organizations report:
- 25% higher productivity
- 50% lower attrition
- 80% better recruiting results compared with non-analytics users.
Shaping organizational strategy
Using people analytics, HR can turn data into insights and align facts to organizational strategy and business goals. Using this data, HR leaders can gain a seat at the leadership table and educate leaders on how new strategies and processes will improve the bottom line and drive business forward.
Key metrics in people analytics
Tracking the right KPIs helps HR leaders move beyond assumptions and make data-backed decisions. The most pivotal metrics include:
Employee turnover rate
The employee turnover rate measures the percentage of employees who leave an organization during a specific period.
There are three types of employee turnover:
Absenteeism rate
The absenteeism rate measures how often employees are absent from work during a specific period and is a key workforce management and people analytics metric.
Time to Hire (TTH)
Time to Hire measures how long it takes to hire a candidate once they enter your recruitment pipeline. It’s a core recruitment and people analytics KPI used to assess hiring efficiency.
Cost per hire
Cost per Hire measures the total cost an organization spends to hire a new employee. It’s a critical recruitment and people analytics KPI used to evaluate hiring efficiency and ROI.
eNPS
eNPS measures employee loyalty and engagement by asking how likely employees are to recommend your organization as a place to work.
Revenue per employee
Revenue per Employee measures how efficiently a company generates revenue from its workforce. It’s a key workforce productivity and people analytics KPI, often used by leadership and investors.
We360.ai: Leverage features that translate more than just dashboards
People analytics today is about more than tracking metrics. It’s about driving decisions that improve performance, retention, and business outcomes. As organizations rely increasingly on data to manage their workforce, they need people analytics tools that deliver clarity, accuracy, and actionable insights across the entire employee lifecycle.
We360.ai enables this shift by bringing together productivity, performance, engagement, and workforce data into a single, intelligent people analytics solution. Instead of just showing what happened, we360.ai helps HR leaders understand why trends like attrition, absenteeism, or declining productivity occur and what actions to take next.
If you’re looking to move beyond dashboards and make analytics and HR truly strategic, we360.ai delivers measurable impact. It’s not just a workforce analytics tool, it’s a smarter way to build a high-performing workforce.
If you too want to take people analytics one step further, book a FREE DEMO with we360.ai today!
