Top Strategies for Overcoming Labor Costing Challenges

More and more organizations are embracing business intelligence and the possibilities it opens up for them. With everyone talking about data-driven decision making, data-driven metrics, and data-driven goals, business intelligence is the essential piece your organization needs to gain more visibility and start operating more strategically.

Taking the leap into business intelligence can be daunting. However, by breaking it down into its core components, you can make it much more manageable to digest. And it all starts with the questions you want to answer. Let’s take a look at employee retention as an example.

Looking at Metrics for Your Retention Strategy

Say you’ve noticed quite a few employees leaving the organization recently. You may be wondering if your turnover rates have been rising recently, or if this is more typical. You may be wondering why any employee ever leaves your organization. You may be wondering how long it might take to replace that employee and how much it will cost to do so. And finally, you may be wondering what you can do to help increase your retention rates.

Once you know what questions you need answered, you know what data you need from your business intelligence software. For the questions just mentioned, for example, we may need to look at historical turnover rates to determine if these numbers have been trending upwards or remaining steady over time. To find out why employees leave, you need to hold exit interviews, document the responses, and ideally, compare these responses to those given in stay interviews. Average time to hire and time to fill can give you an idea of how long it might take to fill the newly opened position, while cost-per-hire can tell you how much you can expect to spend. And, to determine what might help you improve retention, you might collect data from regularly administered employee engagement surveys, implement changes based on the feedback, and measure the results.

Great! So how do we get all of this data then?

Custom Reporting for Business Intelligence Insights

All of this information is out there whether you’re aware of it or not and whether you’re collecting it or not. But it’s up to you to ensure it’s being collected, tracked, and analyzed to create meaningful and actionable insights – in other words, to enable data-driven decision making. In a modular HR and Payroll system, you may need to look in a lot of different places to collect the data, compile numbers in an Excel sheet, and manually calculate the numbers you’re looking for.

And all of this is actually just one small example looking at retention at your organization. The same applies to every other dimension of workforce management, including recruiting, onboarding, productivity, employee engagement, performance, operational efficiency, and so on.

On the other hand, a unified platform can greatly ease these processes, by keeping all of your workforce data in a centralized location. If this platform also has reporting capabilities built in, you’ll be able to draw up reports almost instantaneously. When you know what information you need and know what to look for, creating reports from centralized data will become an easy and painless task. After all, your business intelligence insights shouldn’t bog you down in data collection and additional work, they should quickly and easily provide meaningful information that lets you take action and drive your organization forward.

Operational effectiveness is a top concern from both a finance and an operational perspective. While a finance executive might be concerned about efficiencies in order to reduce costs, an operations executive might want to improve internal processes to enable employees to be able to complete tasks more quickly and easily to meet organizational goals. When it comes to determining the effectiveness of your operations, it’s important to take a close look at the organization-wide workforce data stored in your HR and Payroll systems.

Many organizations of all sizes rely on modular HR and Payroll systems for their operations, but these systems can pose some problematic challenges. A top concern is the lack of a centralized database to store and organize important information, resulting in the inability to collect workforce analytics. This isn’t just an HR problem or a Payroll problem. Lack of complete and accurate workforce data can have far-reaching effects that span Finance and Operations as well.

Many modular systems involve the rekeying of the same information in different places, which is not just an inefficiency, but can also result in conflicting information. The bigger problem with not having a centralized system for employee and organizational data is the inability to access workforce analytics that are complete, accurate, and timely. With data stored all over the place, piecing together different elements in order to analyze them is a time-consuming process. It can be easy to draw up data that’s incomplete or incorrect, limiting the scope of insights you can rely on from the data.

Why Your Organization Needs Workforce Analytics

When everything is operating smoothly at your organization, you may have little concern about workforce analytics. After all, if things are going well, there’s no need to make any changes. But workforce analytics can provide greater insight into how well your organization is running and where there’s room for improvement. Perhaps there are specific programs that are not running all that efficiently, or maybe there’s a better way to allocate an employee’s time. Workforce analytics can provide you with this information and enable you to make proactive changes that will help your organization thrive not just now, but also into the future.

A Unified Solution for Workforce Analytics

So what’s the alternative to a modular system that can help us collect meaningful workforce insights? A unified HR and Payroll platform that centralizes your data can greatly increase your visibility into your workforce. With a unified solution in place, you’ll more easily be able to pull the information you need to draw up comparisons and reports that give you the helpful insights you need to make strategic, data-driven decisions at your organization.

Position Control software is an essential workforce management tool for leaders who want to drive their organization forward. In order for your organization to achieve its mission, you need visibility into your entire workforce. Much of this visibility comes from your ability to draw up the reports and information you need from your workforce management software.

If you’re relying on multiple or modular systems to handle your workforce management, you can easily end up with incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated information – which is completely useless if you’re trying to make strategic business decisions. This is where Position Control software truly shines. Providing a completely unified workforce management system that’s based on positions rather than employees, Position Control offers a single source of truth that addresses many of your top workforce analytics challenges all at once.

Position Control Ensures Accuracy

Organizing workforce management information within a single system ensures that you don’t end up with missing or conflicting data. Modular systems often require entering the same information in different places, introducing the opportunity for data entry errors.

Pulling reports from modular systems can be problematic as well, as multiple systems don’t always allow for the seamless flow of information. This can result in either incomplete reports or reports that require a lot of manual labor to piece together the information you need. With the single, unified system that Position Control software provides, inaccurate and incomplete information are things of the past.

Position Control Offers Real-Time Data

Because Position Control allows you to pull workforce analytics from a single source, your reports are generated almost instantaneously. This means you have access to data in real time, enabling you to get an accurate picture of your organization today and plan effectively for the future. For those relying on manual processes to pull reports, it’s easy to always feel like you’re one step behind. Position Control software essentially catches you up so that you can get one step ahead instead.

Position Control Provides Relevant Information

Reports are useless if they don’t provide you with the information you need. Because Position Control organizes your workforce by position rather than employee and feeds directly into HR and Payroll data, it provides unsurpassed drill-down capabilities that let you cross-reference, filter, and easily view exactly the information you’re looking for. Whether you need to look at budget allocations by program vs. department, vacancy reports, daily lost revenue data, or other roll-up reports, Position Control gives you the ability to find the information you’re looking for.

Position Control Helps Many Departments Succeed

The reporting and analytics capabilities that are inherent to Position Control systems is just one of the many benefits this unified software provides. Position Control can help across a wide range of departments – for example, HR can seamlessly recruit and track applicants while providing a smooth onboarding process, Finance can budget more effectively by seeing exactly where each dollar is going throughout the entire organization, and Operations can streamline business processes so that the entire workforce is able to work together off of the same information to achieve better results. All in all, Position Control enables behavioral health organizations to operate more effectively to provide better quality care and serve more members of their communities.

Using Business Intelligence Software to Uncover Organizational Insights

At this point, everyone knows that business intelligence software can add incredible value for an organization’s leaders. But what value can this add for the Health and Human Services industry and, more importantly, for your organization specifically?

Why Boilerplate Business Intelligence is Not the Answer

Much of the information out there regarding BI speaks of big data and artificial intelligence and using them to measure customer behavior, revenue, profit margins, and the likes. While these large-scale insights might be important details for Fortune 500s, they offer little use for Health and Human Services organizations, many of which are nonprofits, that deal with a much different set of challenges and function in an inherently different manner.

As a CEO, you need business intelligence software that offers full visibility into your organization so that you can easily view key insights and use this information to make important decisions about your staff, programs, and services. What you don’t need are boilerplate reports with lots of unnecessary information that doesn’t pertain to your business. You need business intelligence software that can provide you with:

• Detailed insights into labor costs and funding allocations, performance outcomes broken down by department, turnover trends by program, and daily lost revenue for open positions, just to name a few
• Information that is complete, accurate, and current, based on trustworthy data
• Reports broken down into easy-to-understand charts and graphs so you can quickly identify the information you need
• Custom reporting options that quickly let you drill down and focus on the smaller details

Being Clear on What You Need from Business Intelligence Software

The truth is, most business intelligence software isn’t built with your needs in mind. It’s built as a point solution that can be purchased separately as yet another system to piece together with your existing systems. And that’s the problem. To be truly effective and useful, business intelligence needs to live within your existing systems, so that it shares the same key information and data model. Since labor costs often make up 70-80% of your budget, it makes the most sense for business intelligence to be built into your HR and Payroll system — providing a single source of truth with a holistic solution.

Even modular systems, like a benefits administration software, do a poor job of pulling complete and accurate data from every other module in the system, like recruiting or payroll. So, how can another module for business intelligence help you get the information you need from pieced together systems?

Making high-level decisions that will impact your organization’s future can be stressful, but things get significantly easier when you have the data you need to be confident in your decisions help you use hard numbers to gain support for ongoing and new initiatives. The first step towards getting there is finding business intelligence software that is made for you and will help your organization achieve its mission. It’s also important to be clear on what type of information you’d like to get from it and to make sure ahead of time that the software has those capabilities.

Five Essential Elements that Make HR Software a Valuable Tool

As an HR executive, you play a key role in driving your organization forward in its strategic initiatives. An important part of that responsibility involves making sure you are providing the HR tools and resources your team needs to effectively recruit, onboard, and manage talent at your organization. In fact, a comprehensive HR and Payroll system is one of the most valuable HR tools you can have. Here are five essential elements of an HR and Payroll system that the modern HR department needs in order to operate efficiently and address the complex needs of today’s workforce.

1. Online Document Management

Whether your organization has 50 people or 5,000, handling things on paper or a series of spreadsheets simply isn’t going to cut it. These types of processes leave the door wide open for human error, lost or missing documentation, and duplicate information, all of which can result in major headaches for your HR department – not to mention potentially devastating compliance issues. A unified online document management system can help you input, organize, and store all of your employee information in a single location that your team can easily access and view as needed.

2. Business Intelligence Data

How is your organization performing currently? When asked this question, you should be able to answer with more than a general, “Good, I think.” What you need is the ability to pull up the numbers and hard data that give a birds-eye view of your organization from whatever angle you’d like to analyze it from. Business intelligence is an essential HR tool that gives you key insights into your workforce, whether you want to know average time-to-hire, costs broken down by department, or any other information. These types of workforce analytics need to be based on information that is complete and current – another reason having a comprehensive HR and Payroll system is so important. Business intelligence empowers you to make strategic decisions that help drive your organization forward.

3. Recruitment Automation Tools

Recruiting continues to be a top initiative among Health and Human Services organizations. And, as any recruiter knows, finding the right person to fill a role isn’t always the easiest thing to accomplish. In fact, TalentNow reports that top candidates are often only available for 10 days before getting hired, making it essential to make the recruiting cycle as short and efficient as possible. That’s why recruitment automation is also one of the top HR tools for executives to invest in. Automating the recruitment process doesn’t mean removing people from the selection process. Instead, it means letting computers take care of some of the heavy lifting so that your team can focus on engaging with the applicants. Automation tools can help you consolidate your applicant pool, track applicants throughout the process, and make it easier to transition to the onboarding stage when you’re ready.

4. A Talent Management System

Talent management isn’t just about making sure your employees can do their jobs. Today, this area of focus covers much more, including everything from career development and personal growth to employee engagement and motivation at the workplace. From a compliance perspective, it’s also important that you’re able to manage employee credentials as well, ensuring everyone is up to date with their certifications and any other credentials required for their role. However, many organizations lack a formal talent management program or have options that employees simply aren’t aware of. A talent management system is a powerful HR tool that will not only help you organize all of this information, but also empower employees to take charge of their own personal development at your organization.

5. Position Control

Position Control helps you manage your workforce based on the positions that make up the organization, rather than employees. With today’s dynamic workforce, Position Control has become absolutely essential. As employees come on board, leave positions, or advance within the company, Position Control helps you easily maintain a bird’s eye view of your workforce, including accurate headcounts and open positions that are approved to be filled. A comprehensive platform based on Position Control in instrumental in reducing inefficiencies, minimizing risks, and keeping things neat and tidy so your team can focus on the organization’s mission rather than a pile of paperwork.

From recruiting and retention to talent management, HR tools have the capability to aid in just about every aspect of HR. However, as versatile as these HR tools may be, they do not replace the human element that your team brings to the organization. Instead, these elements of your HR and Payroll system are designed to make the numerous responsibilities of your team easier to accomplish – minimizing paperwork and tedious processes to shift your HR department’s focus to more strategic initiatives.

Data Integration Models for Pay-for-Performance: A CFO Perspective

Human services organizations are currently working on strategies to manage the changing landscape of value-based purchasing and pay-for-performance. As this new era continues to evolve, many C-Suites are challenged with preparing their organizations to meet the demands of new payment models. The first, and most crucial, step to managing these changes is to ensure that the organization has the right tools in place. Next, executive teams need to develop ways to combine data from multiple sources in order to produce the reports needed to meet payer-mandated performance requirements and manage value-based contracts.

Across many organizations, the surprising champion for these new initiatives is the CFO.  The CFO position has been historically diverse, wearing hats in accounting and strategy. However, in recent years they have seen an unprecedented surge in time spent within the HR and IT departments. According to Robert Half Management Resources, CFOs have reported a 21% increase in time spent in HR and a 19% increase in time spent in IT. This is due largely to the fact that the complexity of the financial environment is growing rapidly between healthcare reform, new payment models, and difficult cost allocations, driving the need for increased collaboration between departments to streamline data collection and reporting.

The CFO is now responsible for collecting information from multiple systems to compile robust reports on the productivity of employees, and programs as a whole, for the analysis of costs and revenues at a granular level. This requires the organization to have highly capable systems in place, such as General Ledger, HR & Payroll, and EHR software solutions. However, the biggest challenge comes from finding ways to cohesively combine data from these systems using efficient integrations.

Efficient integration can be the biggest hurdle for CFOs, particularly if the core systems that they are using are already “pieced-together”. The average organization uses 3-4 systems to manage HR & Payroll, with only 13% using one, unified system. This can prove to be problematic, especially when considering that salaries and benefits are the highest expenses that organizations face. Those expenses are significant in the productivity, cost, and revenue calculations needed for a pay-for-performance model.

In order to fuel data collection and innovative integrations, a stable structure needs to be developed. One way to approach this is by automating multi-dimensional labor distribution through the use of organizational levels such as Job Code, Funding Source, Location, Program, Cost Center, and more. Organizational levels can then be assigned to positions and inherited by employees. By mapping GL codes throughout different organizational levels, you will be able to generate a GL file from your HR system into your Financial system, that will include the robust labor distribution data required to meet payer requirements.

Additionally, integrating your EHR with your HR & Payroll enables the transfer of service delivery units into the HR system. This will allow your organization to automatically allocate hours worked to the proper programs or, organizational levels. This helps organizations break down their labor costs by program in order to analyze the breakdown of costs and revenues at a granular level. Your organization will be able to produce reports that show the service level delivery of each employee. This information is critical to maintaining accurate staffing levels and ensuring that you are providing the highest quality care.

Maintaining multi-system integration between EHR, HR & Payroll, and GL systems allows organizations to measure the productivity and effectiveness of programs at a level of granularity that would have been otherwise unachievable. Not only is your organization able to track costs across organizational levels, you will also be able to understand the costs needed to achieve outcomes and deliver higher quality care. Combining this comprehensive data for costs, revenues, and service-level performance, allows CFOs to position their organization for efficient and manageable value-based contracts.

This DATIS Blog was written by MJ Craig, DATIS, on January 27th, 2016 and may not be re-posted without permission.

Can Data Analytics Help You Hire Better Candidates?

Data analytics have been growing in popularity in recent years and have become invaluable for many aspects of organizational management. Data analytics help to identify strengths and weaknesses of an organization, while assisting in solving complex business problems. As many executives have learned, poor hiring choices can be extremely costly, making high turnover an expensive challenge for HR departments today. Not only is it expensive, high turnover can also damage an organization’s culture and reputation. Luckily for HR departments, data analytics can be made useful for hiring the proper candidates.

The Recruitment Success Rate
The success rate of recruiting is based on a process that starts when the candidate first applies for a position and ends with the acceptance or declination of a job offer. Most frequently, the analytics used to measure this effectiveness are cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, turnover ratio, and quality-of-hire. Additionally, HR departments can track where people fall off in the process, whether it is during the screening interview or some other part. By identifying these gaps, an organization can improve their hiring processes. Another tool HR departments can use is HR software. HR software can prescreen candidates based on the criteria required for a specific job, which reduces time-to-fill by eliminating manual processes and certain biases. Harvard Business Review has found that these algorithms outperform human decisions by at least 25%.

Identify Job Requirements
A thorough job analysis can be utilized to identify the position requirements. These competencies can be degrees, licenses, personality traits, and more. Once these competencies have been identified, the hiring process can be built around them.

Utilizing Assessments
Depending on the job requirements, assessments can be a great tool to identify the perfect candidate. These assessments can be personality tests, cognitive exams, or interviews structured to extract answers to certain questions. Some positions may be best performed by someone with certain personality traits, which can be identified through a myriad of personality tests, the most commonly used being the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator. Cognitive exams can be administered if certain abilities are necessary to perform a job, similar to a doctoral candidate taking the boards to ensure they have the knowledge to perform their job. When choosing an assessment, be sure to pick one based off of research and theory that has the statistics to back up its predictive ability for a candidate’s success. Additionally, it is important to give all of the candidates for that position the same assessment in order to eliminate bias.

Recruiting can be a complicated task with potentially high expenses if done incorrectly. However, when used properly, data analytics can mitigate the biases and reduce expenses to ensure you hire the best candidate to suit the unique needs of your organization.

This DATIS Blog was written by Carley Donovan, DATIS, on February 10th, 2016 and may not be re-posted without permission.