Recently, Intermountain Healthcare had a 36% growth projection, and as vice president of human strategy and delivery, Jim Ritchey needed to make sure there were enough physicians in his work field to support that growth.

To begin, Ritchey looked at his data. “Once I understand the turnover, the growth, the data of where I am today, then I want to understand at the operational level my risk. So I sent out a basic questionnaire to my operators to assess turnover at high, moderate, or low risk and see how many people that was going to generate.”

Looking at data not only helped Ritchey to understand the task properly but also helped him to effectively strategize. “We looked at the benchmark from our perspective of how many recruiters it takes to hire a number of physicians and the benchmark data tells us how many recruiters we need.”

From analyzing employees’ sentiments to predicting turnover, people analytics can be a powerful tool for human resource leaders to yield to their advantage. During From Day One’s Denver conference, Ritchey and other leaders sat down with Matt Bloom, a reporter at Colorado Public Radio, to talk about the importance of people analytics and strategies leaders can lean on.

Start with the Business

With over 3,000 metrics, people analytics software company Visier has a lot of data to offer leaders. As principal of research and value, Andrea Derler advises leaders to look at the data that matters most to the business.

“Start from the biggest business needs and see what the business needs to answer. Some metrics that everybody should have on hand all the time are talent movement, volunteer turnover, involuntary turnover, resignation rates, and retirement rates,” Derler said.

Understanding these core metrics is key to building other initiatives and priorities for a company, Derler says. “You may be interested strategically in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and if that’s a big topic for your organization, you need data on representation of demographics and gender, as well as pay equity and compensation for those groups.”

Lead with a Story

When analyzing data, leaders should look for the story they want to tell. Vice president of business partnerships, diversity, and talent acquisition at building materials company Summit Materials, Monet Hires advises leaders to look beyond the raw metrics and look for the problems and solutions they may hint at.

“Stories are made up of multiple components. People might look at turnover statistics or just an engagement number, but in isolation, it’s not as impactful. You have to build all those components together,” Hires said. “What is our engagement? What is our turnover? How does that compare and contrast to onboarding or exit surveys to inform our ultimate stories?”

Looking at data for the story has not only helped Hires understand how her employees feel, but also see the differences in sentiment that arise with different employee populations. “We dug a little deeper and had intentional focus groups with certain segments of the population to get better insights as to what people are feeling and getting in terms of feedback,” Hires said.

When processing and understanding large data sets, leaders may get overwhelmed by where to begin their stories. In cases like this, AI can be a significant help, Andrea Osborne, vice president of people, product research and development at software company Genesys, said.

“AI can do some of the legwork for you if you have the right tool and the right trusted source of data. This lets you focus on providing the business insight versus crunching stuff in a spreadsheet or trying to connect data from finance to HR manually,” Osborne said.

Osborne isn’t alone in adapting AI in her work; in fact, 81% of human resources leaders have explored or implemented AI solutions to improve efficiencies in their companies. “AI can automate some of those processes and bring your data together. You can then provide the story and help the business to decide what to do with it,” Osborne said.

Listen to the Data, Then Act

As chief operating officer of employee engagement company Achievers, Kristian Gaetano does a lot of listening in his role. Listening, Gaetano says, can give valuable insight into employees’ overall sentiment toward a business.

“We have a weekly check-in tool that pops up on Monday mornings for each of our employees and asks them, ‘How are you feeling about work today?’ They can respond with things about their compensation, manager, or something that happened in their personal life,” Gaetano said.

The data can give leaders a snapshot of how employees are feeling from different time frames and how different news and actions can affect employees. “For example, if I speak at a town hall and the intentions are good and my message is to certain groups, employees might interpret that as me saying, ‘We’re closing an office.’ The next day, you can see in the data that the scores are lower and comments like, ‘I'm fearful about this new office.’”

Actively listening to employees can allow leaders to act quickly to resolve any concerns before they escalate. “That ability to have this always-on listening is the most powerful to us,” Gaetano said.

“If it is something that comes out across the organization and there’s quite a response, we will reconvene as a leadership team and try to understand what’s at the root of it, and then we’ll re-communicate it in a better way.”

Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City.