People analytics: Opportunities and challenges for the hospitality industry

Business numbers are everywhere: we use them in finance, economics, statistics and marketing. There are, however, certain domains where numbers are new to the game. When we talk about employee management, numbers are relatively unseen. For a long time, there was a belief that each human and each company was unique, and while I cannot wholly disagree, there are benefits to looking at people and organizations based on a certain number of variables. For instance, we can compare companies' profitability, turnover rate and staff engagement. Similarly, we can compare employees on several performance metrics, degree of job satisfaction and amount of pre-hire experience.

People analytics is described as using people’s data to make the right decisions in a company and gain a competitive advantage. Descriptive analytics attempt to describe the present (e.g., What is the voluntary turnover rate in this company? What is the percentage of employees who are satisfied by their salary? How many employees fall in the category of being poor performers?), but they do not provide any guidance to companies about the best course of action; they just indicate a problem to be solved.