---
title: HR Analytics in the Era of the Great Resignation
description: Shahrukh walks us through his approach to HR Analytics and how it can apply to improve your Human Resource KPIs during the era of the Great Resignation
---

[Blog — DataDrive ](https://godatadrive.com/blog)

# [HR Analytics in the Era of the Great Resignation](https://godatadrive.com/blog/hr-analytics-in-the-era-of-the-great-resignation)

 Written by [Shahrukh Khan](https://godatadrive.com/blog/author/shahrukhgodatadrive-com) | May 18, 2022

2021 was a prominent and influential year in the world of Human Resources. The pandemic pushed working professionals to adapt, whether it would be awkwardly scurrying to find the exit button on a zoom call or simply ordering groceries online, the lifestyle changes from the pandemic continue to leave an impact.

However, one noticeable trend continues to be a subject of research: the [Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm) indicated that ***4 million*** people quit their jobs last February. It begs the question: ***why*** did we see a** **record number of people quitting their jobs last year to pursue other opportunities?

In this blog, I will talk about the importance of HR analytics during what is being deemed as The Great Resignation, how understanding employee turnover can benefit your business, on some practical tips on how to do so.

 

## Employee Turnover and Why You Should Care

        Attrition or employee turnover refers to the percentage of employees who leave your company during a specific period. In general, turnovers include resignations, terminations, or retirements but don't include the internal movement of jobs within an organization.

Why is it important to maintain a low rate of turnover from an organizational standpoint? It comes down to three main reasons:

1. It costs money to hire and train new talent.
2. High attrition impacts your organization's ability to complete your work.
3. High attrition makes it challenging to acquire new employees.

### It costs money to hire and train talent

Finding the right talent for your own business is difficult **and expensive. **It's hard to associate an exact cost for recruiting. The recruiting process consists of expenses related to advertising a job posting and any time spent building that job posting, sorting through potential candidates, and then interviewing them.

Suppose we [put a price tag on the cost of attrition](https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/employee-retention-the-real-cost-of-losing-an-employee). In that case, it can range from anywhere from [30% to almost two times an employee's annual salary](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx#:~:text=The%20cost%20of%20replacing%20an,to%20%242.6%20million%20per%20year), depending on the industry.

 

### High attrition makes it hard to get work done

This one needs little explanation, when skilled people leave the company, work is often interrupted or stopped until a replacement is found.  Even then, it can take a while for your new hire to get back to your prior employee’s level of productivity.  It can be [months, sometimes years](https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/employee-retention-the-real-cost-of-losing-an-employee),[ for that new employee to achieve the same level of productivity as your prior employee.](https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/getting-new-hires-up-to-speed-quickly/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20the%20time%20for,to%20get%20up%20to%20speed)

 

### High attrition makes it challenging to acquire new employees

It's normal to have employees leave the company. However, when you have a high rate of employees leaving within a short period, you ponder "why?", and so does your team and those on the outside looking in.

A high attrition rate is often indicative of a work environment and a company culture that is not sustainable in the long run. With proper analytics, you may be able to link attrition to inadequate work-life balance, poor working conditions, a non-inclusive work environment, etc.

Employees who leave voluntarily due to poor company culture tend not to refer those in their network to their previous workplace. This makes it difficult to recruit talent, which contributes to the cycle of making it more expensive to find new talent and much more expensive to lose existing talent.

** **

## The HR Analytics & Attrition Dashboard

 

So, how do we get ahead of all this?  The domain of HR analytics can give us insight into a broad spectrum of potential issues and solutions, whether it's understanding your organization's workforce distribution, gauging diversity/inclusion goals, or forecasting budgets.

To show you what I mean, we've built a [Tableau dashboard](https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/shahrukh/viz/HRAnalyticsAttritionOverview/Overview) to demonstrate the value of HR analytics and attrition analytics. The dashboard shown below is an example of how an organization can evolve its HR Analytics, regardless of where they currently fall on Gartner's analytics [maturity model](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/STAGES-OF-DATA-ANALYTICS-MATURITY-ADAPTED-FROM-DAVENPORT-HARRIS-2007-GARTNER-2012_fig1_325285755)  (Figure 1).

 

                                

### About the Dashboard

**         **This dashboard was built using this dataset [here](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/pavansubhasht/ibm-hr-analytics-attrition-dataset). With this dashboard, we'll start off with a general overview, followed by an in-depth analysis of attrition.

High turnover presents a number of issues for an organization. Minimizing turnover helps retain experienced talent and positions a business to better attract top talent. This dashboard is intended to help organizations understand their current employee landscape and how they can use their data for actionable insight with regard to attrition. Let’s start at the beginning of the Gartner Analytics Maturity Model…

 

### Demonstrate **descriptive** HR analytics and attrition (*What happened?*)

 

The first page of the dashboard gives us an overview of our organization. Using this page of our dashboards some of the insights we can quickly uncover are:

- Effectively gather the characteristics & demographics of our organization such as a total number of employees, age, gender, backgrounds etc:

- Understand results from recent surveys of satisfaction by department:

- Identify individuals who have been in a position for a substantial amount of time.

### Perform **diagnostic **analytics on Attrition

## (*Why it Happened?*)

 

We’ve noticed that our attrition rate is high, and we want to dive in further. Our second page of the dashboard allows us to start diagnosing why that may be. Some insights we can uncover from this view include:

- Overtime appears to be a significant driver of why employees leave
- A large number of employees quit within the first year of joining.
- Naturally, employees with low satisfaction responses on our survey had more turnover.

### Identify High-risk employees for turnover and showcase model findings on employee turnover

## (*What will happen? And H**ow can we make it **not** happen**?*)

 

Our third page of the dashboard is an interactive way to showcase our ‘data science’ findings within Tableau. A few highlights from this dashboard are:

- Why you should use this model:
- Statistically significant influential factors:
- Turnover Calculator:
- Common Characteristics & Crosstab:

## Getting Buy In on Your Models from Your Team:  Visualizing Model Performance with Tableau

 

This page of the dashboard is intended for data scientists. As a data science professional, I find it a bit of a nuisance to manage and keep track of models and their health. If tableau is a part of our tech-stack, we can build a dashboard that can help us understand, organize and manage our model lifecycles better. With this dashboard we can:

- Flip between hundreds of different iterations of models we’ve built for our dataset and compare important evaluation metrics.
- Dynamically sort through all models with respect to key-metrics and thresholds:
- Observe K-S Charts and Confusion Matrices:

## Conclusion

Hopefully, you now have some ideas on how you can apply analytics to your own Human Resources datasets in order to improve employee retention and understand key trends while you still have time to act on them. 

 

[View full post](https://godatadrive.com/blog/hr-analytics-in-the-era-of-the-great-resignation)

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