8 Benefits of Using People Analytics
From higher productivity to better employee retention rates, using people analytics and workforce intelligence brings countless practical benefits. We've ranked the top eight below.
There are countless life decisions we’d never leave up to chance. Will the bridge support the vehicle’s weight? Is the accused actually innocent?
We demand evidence because the stakes are too high to guess.
Yet most orgs still make their most consequential decisions—when to hire, who to promote, how to reinforce cultural values and behaviors—based on simple reporting and one-dimensional metrics that tell you what happened, but not the root-cause issue.
We partnered with Deloitte to study this, and what we found was that 70% of execs believe they’d be able to make faster decisions with better access to people data.
People analytics changes that. It gives HR leaders the same evidence-based foundation that every other business-critical function already relies on.
The ultimate power couple is when people analytics is augmented by workforce intelligence, to deliver guidance on what to do with people analytics data once verified and trusted.
Below are eight ways people analytics delivers that foundation across the employee lifecycle.
Why people analytics is crucial
The power of people analytics in everyday decision-making is undeniable. Visier's People Analytics Maturity Survey of nearly 100 organizations found that companies embracing people analytics outperformed industry benchmarks with 18% higher profit margins and 23% higher return on assets. Every publicly traded Visier customer in the survey outperformed the industry standard across both metrics.
But, on their own, most of the top HR metrics do not provide strategic value to the business. Take headcount reports. They often fail to help HR articulate what is needed to meet a business goal or need. They don’t reveal how staffing shortfalls will impact revenue goals or net promoter scores.
By shifting the focus away from isolated metrics towards dynamic trends that tie directly to revenue, turnover cost, and workforce risk, HR leaders are becoming a strategic voice for the C-suite. We’re now seeing the CHRO alongside the CEO and CFO as a unit, with people strategy and the decisions related to it rooted firmly in data-driven insights.
With people analytics, you can capture your CEO’s attention by digging deeper into strategic HR metrics such as:
Revenue per employee
Quality of hire improvement
Performance turnover in key jobs
Dollars of revenue lost due to position vacancy days
HR effectiveness
New hire failure rate
Diversity in employee population
And once you have the right foundational data, you can use workforce intelligence to make decisions that matter for your business’s bottom line.
8 benefits of using people analytics
There are several opportunities to leverage people analytics across the employee lifecycle. Here are just eight examples of how analytics drives value and has a quantitative impact on how organizations:
Boost employee retention
Build an equitable pay structure
Improve hiring practices
Optimize learning and development
Facilitate diversity in employee population
Optimize workforce planning
Streamline org structure
Increase employee productivity
1. Boost employee retention
Targeted retention informed by people analytics significantly reduces employee turnover. A people analytics and workforce intelligence platform is able to surface flight risk signals (like an employee hitting a 2-to-3-year tenure mark without a promotion or compensation adjustment) early. This gives HR time to intervene before a regrettable loss becomes inevitable.
One U.S. healthcare organization with more than 7,500 employees used Visier Workforce AI to do exactly that.
Their HR team built a cost of turnover analysis that quantified the full financial impact (including direct recruiting costs and indirect costs like reduced productivity and patient diversions) making a compelling case for proactive retention investment.
For the first time, HR could speak to leadership in financial terms, shifting from reactive reporting to a forward-looking strategy that reduced annual turnover by 10%.
2. Build an equitable pay structure
With people analytics, you can run compensation analyses that control for role, tenure, and performance to isolate where pay gaps exist. For instance, you can use Visier to compare compensation profiles across employees in similar positions, which instantly reveals whether gender or ethnicity correlates with lower pay, even after accounting for other variables.
From there, workforce intelligence helps you act on what you find.
It gives managers unbiased guidance during merit cycles, so you're addressing systematic bias at the point of decision rather than cleaning up inequities after the fact.
3. Improve hiring practices
Talent analytics show HR precisely where long-term, high-performing employees come from and which attributes produce them. This tells them which sourcing channels produce their strongest hires, which in turn helps them optimize their recruiting activities.
They also give you the info you need to pick out the best candidates from the applicant pool.
If they all share certain traits (like prior experience or career trajectory), you can build those into your candidate screening criteria going forward.
Using Visier’s Talent Acquisition Analytics, one financial institution was able to leverage this information to improve their hiring process. With people analytics, they reviewed their practices by analyzing each hiring manager’s time-to-hire rates and discovered that efficiency was a key indicator of success.
Then, they implemented a standardized hiring process inspired by the success of their managers who were efficient at hiring. Not only did the bank improve their candidate experience, the bank’s new hire retention improved by 14%. This step ensures that every candidate has the same quality and transparency in their hiring experience.
4. Optimize learning and development
According to LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report, the vast majority of organizations surveyed—88%—were worried about employee retention. The report also found that respondents were using learning opportunities as their main retention strategy.
Why? When on-the-job training opportunities are offered, employees tend to stick around. ADP Research's 2025 People at Work Report found that upskilling opportunities resulted in significantly higher intention to stay across all worker types (12% more among knowledge workers, 23% among skilled task workers, and 27% among cycle workers) compared to those at organizations with no learning and development support.
But applying the same training approach across your entire workforce limits L&D program effectiveness.
To optimize your training modes and sources, you can use…you guessed it: people analytics.
Learning analytics connects the impact of training and development directly to business outcomes. This helps you see what actually moves the needle, not just whether X amount of team members completed a course.
Pitney Bowes does exactly that. Using Visier Workforce AI, they’ve been able to connect their learning activity data to employee performance, engagement, and retention. So in addition to knowing whether an employee has completed the right training before sending them on a service call, they’re also able to see which training correlates with stronger outcomes, then cut what doesn't.
5. Facilitate diversity in employee population
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is quite a powerful thing. Among our own customers, those who prioritize it have 7% higher profit margins and 5.6% higher ROA compared to market benchmarks.
In more ways than one, analytics gives organizations more visibility into diversity initiatives:
Answering questions about the state of diversity throughout an organization and across its employee lifecycle
Identifying areas where intentional or unintentional bias may occur
Helping companies understand how to effectively address problem areas.
Consider one leading industrial manufacturer with an ambitious goal: achieving 50% female parity in leadership roles by 2030. Using Visier Workforce AI, their team analyzed retention and promotion rates for women leaders while also examining how female and minority candidates moved through each stage of the hiring funnel.
The analysis revealed a fundamental issue: women were being dropped from the interview process at a disproportionate rate to their male counterparts.
Armed with that insight, the company introduced unconscious bias training, inclusive hiring workshops, and leadership development programs for female employees.
Importantly, what once took six months of manual analysis took a fraction of the time, they can now quickly perform with the right platform, ensuring they are well on track to meet their 2030 leadership goals.
6. Optimize workforce planning
People analytics gives organizations a real-time view of headcount, attrition risk, and skills gaps. When coupled with workforce intelligence, HR and Finance can turn around and optimize workforce planning initiatives to actually reflect current and future organizational needs.
Beam Suntory, the iconic global beverage company, turned to Visier for their workforce planning initiative. Their goal was to better prioritize internal promotions without leading to excessive vacant positions that would then require external hires.
To this end, Visier built a custom analytics metric called the Build Ratio, which helped the talent acquisition team balance internal promotions and lateral moves against external starts. With this custom metric in place, Beam Suntory could re-prioritize their build-from-within talent strategy, and properly balance that with external hires.
7. Streamline organizational structure
Organizational structure has a direct impact on performance. Too many management layers slow decisions down; too few and managers are stretched thin. People analytics lets you analyze spans of control across the business and identify where structure is working against you.
One our of clients used Visier Workforce AI to find the optimal team size for commercial performance by combining performance management data with spans of control and sales outcomes across different team size ranges.
They quickly found that no magic number exists for their span of control; instead, successful teams are largely determined by their manager.
Some leaders will succeed with more than 20 reports, while others do better with less than five.
This is actually a stronger conclusion than "we found the optimal team size.” It's saying the insight is that there's no one-size-fits-all, and analytics is what lets you act on that nuance rather than defaulting to an arbitrary org chart rule.
8. Increase employee productivity
Productivity and output are two of the hardest performance indicators for companies to understand. We studied this in 2025 and found that 71% of business leaders miss employee productivity and output metrics to understand productivity better.
With people analytics, you can build a productivity index that benchmarks actual time spent on activities against an optimal target, then monitor performance against it continuously.
When you can see exactly where time is being lost, you’re able to act decisively on it.
A large U.S. healthcare company with 120,000+ employees connected their workforce productivity data to financial and operational performance metrics with Visier Workforce AI. By integrating people and revenue data, they could link labor investments directly to business outcomes, improving overall workforce productivity. The result: faster, smarter workforce decisions with a measurable impact on patient care.
How to overcome your people data challenges
HR data is inherently messy and difficult to integrate. But it would be a mistake to let that stop you from moving forward with analytics and workforce intelligence.
You don’t always need “perfect” data
One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make is thinking they need to clean and warehouse their data before doing analytics. Companies starting down the path of analytics should aim for accuracy instead of perfection.
Good business decisions require accurate data, but the data does not need to be perfect all the time. Think of Finance: Financial decisions are changed because of adjusted costs, restated data, or realignments, and those perpetual adjustments are widely accepted.
Determine what decisions need pristine data or “good enough” data
Data accuracy should scale with the stakes of the decision. There are times when you need to have near-pristine data, such as when you’re determining changes to compensation.
On the other hand, “good enough” data can already tell you when certain actions are necessary. If your turnover is between 25% to 30%, for example, it doesn’t matter that you don’t know precisely your turnover; you know you need to act.
The best way to clean data is to start with a business question, such as: ‘Are we retaining the right people?’ Then you can bring all your relevant data to the light and work with it while improving it. This approach drives two favorable results: you won’t let good data go unused and the people who are responsible for the data and accountable for the decisions that are based on that data will be given a more compelling reason to get the data in the system, get it right, and get it done.
What’s the best way to clean data?
The best way to clean data is to start with a business question, such as: “Are we retaining the right people?”
Then you can bring all your relevant data to the light and work with it while improving it.
This approach drives two favorable results. One, you won’t let good data go unused. And two, the people responsible for that data and accountable for the decisions based on it will be given a more compelling reason to get the data in the system, get it right, and get it done.
Transform how business intelligence is delivered to all stakeholders
If you choose to go down the path of trying to build your own analytics system (using BI toolsets like Tableau or Qlik, or trying to integrate data into their transactional HR systems for more comprehensive reporting), you’ll need to bring on data scientists and analytics experts.
There is, however, a better path forward. Visier Workforce AI removes the barrier of analytical complexity for HR practitioners, not by simplifying the data, but by transforming how intelligence is delivered.
Built on a governed, AI-ready workforce data model, it connects understanding, planning, and execution into one continuous decision system guided by an embedded AI agent. Instead of interpreting dashboards, practitioners receive clear guidance about what to do next and the confidence to act on it. And because everyone across HR, IT, and the business works from the same trusted foundation, they get consistent answers to the questions that matter most.
People analytics turns data into confident business decisions
HR is operating in a fundamentally different environment. The rise of AI, the acceleration of skills-based work, and the growing pressure to connect people decisions to business outcomes have raised the bar significantly. Organizations that are navigating this well aren't doing it on instinct. They're doing it with data and intelligence.
The shift is already happening. HR leaders who embrace people analytics and workforce intelligence aren't waiting for a seat at the table—they're already there, sitting alongside the CEO and CFO as equal partners in driving business strategy.
The organizations pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most data. They're the ones turning that data into confident, consistent decisions at every level.
That's what people analytics makes possible, and there's no reason to wait.
