In my experience, despite having access to analytics, a lot of the HR managers we speak with tell us they often find it a challenge to move away from established employee relations processes – it’s difficult to know where to begin, and it’s time consuming. With this in mind, we continue to work with customers in both public and private sectors to develop a five tier model to help organisations understand and mature employee relations cases using data and people analytics.

The idea behind the five step model is to help HR departments move from information gathering and a reactive approach to using information to proactively monitoring and improving existing and future cases through change programmes. The five steps are:

1. Manage and update cases day-to-day – Almost every HR manager / dept. should be doing this as standard
2. Analyse cases using various dimensions – Recording data such as specific department, line manager, and employee demographics can give basic insights into where cases are mostly occurring
3. Analyse where costs occur and the amount of time spent on cases – Reporting on the duration of cases, time spent by HR and investigators, legal costs, mediation costs and the number of days an employee was suspended will go a long way to helping understand how long various stages of the process take
4. ‘Why’ analysis / root cause of cases – By this stage you’ll have lots of factual information about your ER case load, which can be turned into insightful and meaningful data with the potential to put in place proactive interventions to reduce further similar cases occurring
5. Review and benchmark open cases – Cases can take weeks and months to progress, it’s important that you regularly review open cases to ensure they are progressing properly and within time

I have noticed it is most common that HR departments are hovering around steps two or three, with very few organisations taking the time to review their cases for lessons learned and even less proactively using information to bring about interventions to reduce the number of ER cases.

However, the data you collect can give valuable insights into employee relations, such as employees in certain age brackets not being as engaged, through to individual teams underperforming due to a specific manager. This data can be used to put corrective actions in place to reduce further ER cases.