Practical Benefits of HR Analytics

1. Harrah’s Entertainment, which operates several casinos in Las Vegas, found through analytics that on-site health care would be expected to be a significant contributor to increasing their employee engagement. Since implementing on-site health care, engagement has increased, turnover has decreased, and they’ve also saved a great deal on health care related expenses by favoring preventative medicine.

2. Corestar Financial Group, a mortgage bank company, used analytics to improve the performance of its sales staff by tracking the number of customers each employee “closed.” They found that some associates were far more successful at closing deals, and as a result the company changed its processes to route more calls to those individuals, while also working with the underperforming agents to help them improve their sales skills. As a result they have been able to grow annual sales by 45 percent, while only increasing their sales staff by 10 percent.

3. Sysco, one of the largest food distributors in the United States with 161 subsidiaries, used analytics to study the way drivers were being compensated. They were surprised to find that per-mile based pay was actually a very low incentive for their drivers. Based on this finding, they began paying the drivers a base salary and then incentivizing them instead for the number of deliveries they make and the lack of mistakes involved.

4. Major sports teams also rely heavily on human capital analytics and were actually some of the first organizations to develop and use analytics. One of the most prominent is the American baseball team, the Oakland A’s, subject of the bestselling book Moneyball by Michael Lewis. The Oakland franchise employed data analytics to acquire an uncharacteristic group of players, which led to unexpected success for a team with limited financial resources.

5. The Beaufort County (South Carolina) School District (BCSD) sought to find new ways to improve student achievement and therefore began implementing analytics through their 27 different schools and administrative offices.  Measures of schools human capital maturity (among teachers and staff) were statistically linked to measures of student outcomes (standardized test scores). The resulting analysis enabled BCSD to identify specific areas of the district's work and learning environment where the district should target its improvement efforts in order to bolster future student achievement.