New IDC Report Details the Business Value of Visier for Optimizing People Analytics

The key to any organization’s success — or failure — is its people. Despite employees representing most companies’ greatest asset and often, greatest expense, few Human Resources (HR) executives and C-Suite business leaders have been able to leverage the power of people analytics to gain a deeper understanding of their workforce. 

This lack of visibility has never been a more pressing issue than it is today. COVID-19 transformed the workforce at an unprecedented rate, and without visibility into the impacts of these changes, companies will struggle to make optimal decisions that drive both HR-specific and overarching business goals. 

To demonstrate the power of people analytics to address these issues, Visier recently commissioned new research from the International Data Corporation into the value and benefits of their Embedded Analytics and People Analytics solutions, and how they can support users’ HR and Talent Acquisition (TA) operations. The project included 12 interviews with organizations that were using this solution and had detailed knowledge about its benefits and costs.

The results were compelling; Visier’s solutions help HR leaders make better decisions that improve efficiency, reduce turnover, and support greater business goals. 

Overall, Visier provided an average 5-year ROI of 293%, and surveyed users generated a return on their investment in 7.5 months. 

Here, we summarize the study’s results, and outline the specific forms of value that users saw.

People analytics increases the performance and effectiveness of HR and TA professionals

Key outcomes: 

• 20% more efficient HR teams

• 5% more efficient TA teams (using Visier’s general people analytics solutions, not a TA specific offering)

• 25% reduction in time spent on HR software management 

• HR teams became 67% more efficient at collecting internal diversity data, 64% more efficient at analyzing internal diversity data, and 50% more efficient at analyzing succession data 

With Visier, HR and TA teams found that they could optimize their daily processes and save significant amounts of time on data collection and analysis, which could then be spent on other activities that support business objectives, such as improving internal systems and processes. 

Much of this efficiency resulted from the speed of access to data that Visier provided — not only could HR and TA business partners access data immediately as needed to answer specific and timely questions, but the data itself was more valuable as it was consistently up to date, unlike manual reports which might take days or weeks to generate. 

Furthermore, because Visier aggregates data from many disparate sources, HR and TA had quick, easy access to a multidimensional view of their organization’s people, rather than needing to collate data together and attempt to draw insights from it on their own. For example, many TA teams gained visibility into their hiring pipeline, and found a new capacity to locate and take action against bottlenecks. 

People analytics reduces turnover and improves HR-employee interactions 

Key outcomes:

• 9% reduction in employee turnover

• 11% more impactful talent conversations 

• Teams became 44% more efficient at analyzing turnover/attrition data

• Teams 40% more efficient at collecting turnover/attrition data

Many of the above benefits played a direct role in helping HR and TA teams understand their problems with employee turnover and attrition, and make data-driven decisions to reduce those rates and retain skilled and valuable workers. 

Notable, Visier helped some HR leaders identify areas of salary compression, and ensure that tenured staff, receiving salary increases based on merit, were able to keep up with new hires in terms of compensation. Without this data, staff morale and job satisfaction could be affected, and resultantly, flight risk could increase. 

Staff could also analyze turnover data much more quickly and effectively through Visier than they would ever have been able to manually. For example, one user was able to break down their turnover data by retail location and examine which stores were dealing with the greatest employee attrition — an especially urgent concern as their focus shifted to keeping their locations afloat during COVID-19. Prior to using Visier, this customer would only have had access to this information once per quarter. 

People analytics supports business goals around revenue, operating expenses, and time to market

Key outcomes:

• $286,000 additional new revenue generated per year

• Operating expenses reduced by $79,000

• 5-year ROI of 293% 

• 16% faster time to market

• 3% better customer satisfaction

• 3% improvement in business processes

Because HR and TA teams using Visier were able to work more efficiently, the business units they partnered with saw their operations become more efficient, too. In a big-picture sense, this led of an average gain of almost 9 full-time positions per organization — a value gain of $614,300! 

The power to make data-driven decisions with ease brought the surveyed users greater agility, flexibility, and readiness to take on new business opportunities. Companies were armed with the information, and machine-learning algorithms, to project the likely outcomes of decisions around new business initiatives and future plans for their workforce. 

Visier also made it easier for organizations to realize their goals around equity, diversity and inclusion. Because Visier provided gender and ethnic diversity data for both the total and management workforces, senior leaders were able to set realistic goals informed by their current diversity levels. 

Understanding data — crucial to achieving people goals

Today’s companies have access to more data than ever before — but the ability to analyze that data, and use it to generate value, is by no means a guaranteed result. As this research made clear, organizations must be able to analyze their people data with immediacy and efficiency in order for it to truly elevate business operations and support goals, and this should be accessible for all members of HR and TA teams, even the less technically inclined. 

Visier’s solution stands apart from other options in its ease, reliability, and ability to centralize large volumes of disparate people data. Especially in a radically shifting workforce, the business leaders of tomorrow will need analytics solutions that make it effortless to make optimal, data-driven decisions about their people. Read the full IDC report to learn more.