“People analytics play a crucial role in learning and development. When used right, they are the reason people and organizations prosper. For companies thriving to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion, analytics become even more important in L&D. They are the bridge companies need to help diverse employees level up with their white counterparts.”
They Help With Skill Development
Many organizations are always on the lookout for opportunities that can help close the skill gap especially for employees of color. Most of the time, diverse hires do not have a similar learning and growth curve as their white colleagues. Learning and development is a key enabler in identifying skills that can help with the personal and professional development of such candidates. The opportunities to use data to hone the skill of your employees are endless.
For starters, your company can take one skill and gauge its metrics across the departments and the employees. Likewise, this can be done by looking into the existing data and finding out the skills that are on the lower side of the curve. Honing in on one skill, keeping in mind that helping diverse employees should be your top priority, organizations can focus on trainings that are the most effective to develop it. This works especially better with knowledge-based skills for employees of color. If you are using your people analytics right, you would find that there will be gaps in white employees collaborating with the black ones for tasks, or BIPOC getting fewer coaching opportunities. This not only helps create coaching programs and better mentorship opportunities for people of color, but also helps design bias interventions, and better collaboration skills among white employees.
They Result In Better Employee Performance
One of the main goals why businesses need to use people analytics for learning and development is to increase the performance of employees. Most organizations test their employee performances set on a certain criterion. While it could be as general as “high, medium, and low”, often there are various descriptions and supporting analytics that encapsulate the performance of an individual across various aspects. This could include leadership, teamwork, communication, management, support, etc. If you pay attention to the datasets and for each employee, you will be able to chart out a deeper analysis of their performance.
Based on this data, various programs can be designed to improve the performance of employees and teams. Similar aptitude employees can be paired for better results. Not just this, but it is an excellent opportunity to check the status of your diversity hires. If in a certain team you see a low level of performance or results, the chances are that the manager isn’t in tune with his team. Among many other such issues, people analytics for L&D will help in finding out biases, discrimination, white superiority, and other barriers that employees of color have to face every day. When you have data, you can analyze it and look for further correlations. Moreover, you will also be able to get results from various trainings, programs, and mentorships. Based on these, you will gather great insights on how L&D can be of further benefit to your employees and company.
They Lead To Increased Turnover
One of the biggest problems for any company these days is the time and cost involved in replacing employees. This becomes even more difficult when you are focusing more and more on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives every day. L&D should be an integral part of the agenda of the companies intending to decrease the diversity turnover. Give your hires of color more opportunities to learn and grow through on-the-job trainings, workshops, mentoring, and education. It enhances their employee experiences and incentivizes their stay within your company. It is one of the ways through which you can create a sense of belonging.
To effectively track the turnover crisis, you need to look into your data. Establish a relationship between various aspects of the employee lifecycle like onboarding, opportunities, engagement, and rewards, etc. and you will be able to find a real connection. Find out where the turnover is less and crisscross your data to see where the lags are at. Using people analytics for the development of diverse employees can become one of the leading causes of increased retention.
They Can Help With Promotions
When there are constant learning opportunities within your company, you will notice your employees growing faster than ever. This will be evident through your data once you start implementing analytics for L&D. In turn, if you ensure a high promotion rate within the company, it will save a lot of costs to hire from the outside. Furthermore, an increase in the internal promotion rate also keeps employees motivated and engaged with all your initiatives because their commitment to the company and personal development will signal growth opportunities. Hence, resulting in more engagement and less turnover.
L&D efforts can help in increased mobility among employees of color. People analytics can help you measure and analyze those efforts. Always remember that the end goal is inclusion here. Diversity has already proven its importance for business development. In a long run, do not forget that you want to not only hire diverse candidates but retain them, and using people analytics for learning and development is one way to do that. While it is important to train your employees of color, it is equally significant to train their white counterparts in their ingrained biases, discrimination, and prejudice. Your diverse hires aren’t a cog in a wheel but one of the major reasons your business will grow leaps and bounds. Treat them as such!
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