Big Data frenzy has taken the world in one go. Almost all organized sector companies, however big or small, wants a finger in the Big Data pie. Today almost every company in the global arena wants to improvise their financial numbers and stats using Big Data in some or the other way.
Companies having lion portions of Big Data are International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, Financial), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN, Financial), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, Financial), Oracle Corporation (ORCL, Financial) and so on with the list never ceasing to stop. Amazon has been the classic example of Big Data user in analyzing and identifying customer trends and spending patterns. Companies have invested billions in effectively using Big Data through in-house application platform development and acquisitions of Silicon Valley startups.
But a key area that remains less explored is the development of their own backyards using Big Data. Let us take a deeper look into the niche opportunities that Big Data can generate
BIG DATA can give you next gen workforce
However big or small an organization is, employee engagement and performance tracking has always remained a challenge and more so for companies with multiple location units. Also another point to bear in mind is that one of the major classifications of expense for any business is the cost to company for maintaining an adequate workforce.
Big Data provides you the most befitting answer to this challenge and helps you to optimize output from one of the major business expense; but HOW? That is what we will take a deeper look into.
For all the attention Big Data has received, many companies tend to forget about one application of it –Â employee engagement. When done in the right way, tracking, analyzing and sharing employee performance metrics can be very beneficial for both the employee and the employer. Taking a leaf from Smart Drive’s study, in the words of Jason Palmer, president of vehicle safety and efficiency of the company, "One of the things we've found to be very powerful is being able to analyze real-time information, boil it down into performance data and empower employees with reports from that data. If you can provide employees with data to do their job better in a succinct and actionable way, it's very motivating."
Another company that is using Big Data to focus on employee engagement is Hubbub Health. It is using social networks to challenge employees to live healthier lifestyles. Brian Berchtold, vice president of marketing and business development, states, "This demonstrates to the employee that the experience is not just "off the shelf" and that it is relevant to the person. This personal relevance delivered higher engagement levels."
Effective use of Big Data analytics to gauge employee performance helps not only in identifying and acknowledging the top performers, but also helps us to spot the struggling or unhappy workers whom the managers often miss out in the bid to chase business targets. Dean Croke, director of sales at transportation analytics firm Omnitracs Analytics, said that this is especially relevant in his industry, in which companies that manage fleets of drivers need to know which employees are most at risk for accidents, voluntary termination or filing workers' compensation claims.
For a very long time the 80-20 theory has been ruling the workforce management arena where it is believed that only 20% of the workforce creates 80% problems. But a factor which is missing in this proposition is the human factor. In 80-20 analysis, the whole workforce gamut is treated on the same plane irrespective of their variant risk exposure or burnout ratio. This is where the role of Big Data analysis comes in handy in a big way. Using the Big Data predictive modeling, which aggregates thousands of data points to look for the risk signatures (discrete patterns in data), managers can identify the cause of performance issues.
Road less taken – BIG DATA analytics
Since it has already been established that employee engagement is one of the core working area of any business model let us introduce BIG DATA analytics into it and find out how Big Data adds mileage to employee satisfaction. Let us take a step by step approach:
Step 1:
Analytics programs can pull and process data for a large number of metrics. Even when applying Big Data to customer service, many businesses struggle to keep up with the volume of information pouring in. For this reason, it is best advised to narrow down the focus to only the most important key performance indicators (KPIs).
Step 2:
Find a program that integrates with the current systems. For any new software that you implement within your company, it's important to make the transition as seamless and simple for the employees as possible. The employees cannot be asked to shun their current work at hand and switch tasks and go to another platform to assimilate and aggregate the data stream. The software should genuinely assist the end user and give a fair value and concise breakup of their key performance through which they can easily earmark their areas of strength and areas of weakness.
Step 3:
The other aspect that needs attention apart from actionable parts would be how the workforce will react to this new data flow. Once the new performance and employee engagement analytics tracker is introduced, the next fact to consider would be how that program fits into employee relationships and workplace culture as a whole. One of the most important factors of this analytic would be to set a perfect synergy and harmony between the information tracker and the workforce sentiments.
No matter which solution you choose, an analytics program moves you away from the traditional manual "reporting" process of performance measurement, helping make your staff more efficient, motivated and engaged.
The big takeaway from BIG DATA
To date we have seen revolution and innovation in business being driven by consumer trend shift and pattern change, but now when the whole business world is going through the storm of cost cutting, the business will have to take the driver’s seat in driving innovation to achieve maximum cost to efficiency ratio and Big Data gives the edge to lead this change.
Whatever might be the dynamics of this change it is bound to add value to your commercial numbers in the long run. So for now as an investor or an analyst it would be best to keep a close eye on the corporate bigwigs that walk the BIG DATA analytics path and accordingly decide taking position in them.
