The Growing Power of HR Data

When’s the last time you (or another leader at your organization) said, “The key to our success as a company is our people.” Yesterday? Earlier today? Probably not more than a week ago.

Human Resources professionals know this without a doubt. People are what make a team function, perform, and succeed. But your work is a little more vaporous when it comes to metrics. It’s hard to measure happiness, satisfaction and culture. So instead, you measure what you can: health and
wellness, engagement with benefit programs, retention, and more. 

Since people are your most valuable asset, that makes your HR data the most valuable data set you have. According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends for 2017, 

“Fifty-six percent of companies we surveyed this
year are redesigning their HR programs to leverage digital and mobile tools.” 

These tools can help HR teams gather, analyze and act on data that will help make the most of their workforce.

There are a number of analytics platforms out there to
measure any number of data points: everything from employees’ movements around the office to their interactions with colleagues  to their lunch purchases. Creepy? Potentially. Valuable data? Most definitely. Businesses can use this information to change office layouts to encourage productivity, find what’s driving teams that excel vs. those who struggle, and offer on-site perks to boost morale.

But it’s not just “Big Brother” behavioral metrics that businesses are tracking. They’re looking at:

• Turnover – which functions, office locations, or positions are at risk
• Talent – forecasting the success of high performers and managing their growth in the organization
• Retention – identify high-churn teams and define solutions
• Forecasting – tracking team and employee growth to get ahead of hiring

Artemis Health’s benefits optimization platform focuses not on employee behavior, but on how they interact with their healthcare and benefits packages. We help employers look at any number of useful data points, such as medical claims, prescriptions drug usage, diagnoses and treatment, costs, and utilization trends.

‍Artemis is finding that HR teams are drowning in data, but unable to find actionable, real-world solutions based on that data.

They’re hungry for information and analyses that can drive decision-making, but instead they’re just collecting bar charts and confusing reports without a firm idea of what to do next.  

While it’s great to know that 10:45 am is the most active time in the 11th floor break room, is that really actionable information? Would you encourage supervisors to create a detailed chart dictating when employees are allowed to take breaks? Not unless you want a mutiny on your hands. Would you encourage office assistants to ensure the coffee pot is full at that time? Maybe, but probably not. Collecting data is not the same as using data to make decisions.  

Artemis not only empowers employers with access to their real benefits data, but also helps them figure out what to do about it. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you want to find out how many employees visited the emergency room in the last year. You can use the Artemis Platform to quickly and easily create a new “Cohort” of these members.

 From there, you can explore all kinds of information on your employees’ ER behavior:

‍

• ER spending by month (cold and flu season sees an uptick)

• Diagnosis (orthopedic vs. conjunctivitis)

• Hotspots or trends for ER visits (i.e. the Atlanta office or spouses visit more than members)

• Possible solutions (the cost / savings of a telemedicine program, better messaging in Atlanta, etc.)

Skilled analysts and consultants can pull this kind of actionable information out of large data sets, but we want to give them a flexible and fast tool to help them do it. Plus, we want anyone to be able to use and understand their data – including the C-suite.

We believe this kind of HR-focused data is as powerful as a company’s finance data. With Artemis, benefits professionals can drive strategic decision making using their own, real analysis of their employee population.