How to Make the Most of Your People Operations Platform

Here’s the scenario: You’re sitting at a board meeting, feeling confident about the presentation you just nailed. But then a board member asks a question involving employee data you haven’t looked at or prepared. 

You can:

1. Become flustered, break into a cold sweat, and either begin making excuses or citing what may be inaccurate information. 
2. Pull out your laptop, click a few buttons, and generate a visualization of your current metrics for all to view and discuss. 

To achieve the latter of the two responses, you need a people operations platform. 

Interested in free software?

Sign up for ChartHop Basic here 

Luckily, you don’t have to wait months to choose the best technology and import your people data. In fact, with the right platform, you can create a dynamic org chart in less than 20 minutes and begin making people decisions quickly and easily. 

Not sure where to start? Below are four ways you can immediately use your org chart so you – and your people – can benefit from a holistic view and understanding of your workforce. 

Visualize Your Workforce Planning

The old way of workforce planning was manually building charts and copying and pasting data, which likely ate up hours from your day. Now, with an automated people operations platform, you can spend your time doing what you actually love: supporting your people. 

Besides having a dynamic view of your organization, a modern platform will allow you to run reports that encapsulate the intersectionalities of your workforce, therefore helping you make informed decisions. 

After setting up your people operations platform, use it to:

• Align leadership. Since your org chart centralizes all of your people data, leadership can easily find the information they need to identify strengths and gaps within current teams. Emily Connery, VP of People and Talent at ChartHop, acknowledges that data is only as useful as it is accessible. She says, “By implementing people analytics technology that consolidates your HR data and optimizes insights through visualizations, everything your team needs to know about your organization is instantly searchable and dynamically surfaced.”
• Give managers a sense of ownership. Frontline managers should have a sense of ownership over their teams. When given transparent views into workforce planning, managers can help plan budget, team goals, hiring, and professional development.
• Examine your roadmap. Looking ahead provides you with a needs analysis of upcoming decisions, such as launching a product, condensing a department, or leading a new round of fundraising. When you accurately forecast, you can make people decisions with intention and confidence. 

Ultimately, by visually capturing snapshots of your workforce, you can make decisions quickly using real-time information without digging through spreadsheets or folders. 

With ChartHop Basic, you can segment your headcount by a variety of factors to ensure you’re hitting your goals.

Use All Your People Data to Make Decisions

Have you ever tried to compile your people data from different sources? It can be a nightmare. According to a data analytics survey by 1Path, 75% of respondents spend at least 132 hours every year on data maintenance and systems. 

While your first thought may be, “Wow, 132 is an incredibly specific number,” your second is probably along the lines of, “What else could those People Leaders be doing with that time?”

The right people operations platform seamlessly integrates with your pre-existing HR systems to reduce time spent on manual work and provide a single source of truth for your people data. 

ChartHop seamlessly integrates data from your HR tech stack into your org chart so it is always up to date.

Just think of the possibilities if you could view your employee profiles next to information generated from payroll, equity, benefits, recruitment software, and communication platforms. Instead of scrambling to find up-to-date metrics before a presentation, you could spend more time analyzing insights to drive real action. 

In short, to make the most out of your people operations platform, sync your HR tech stack. By doing so, your generated reports will show the full picture of your people data, leading to better insights and decisions to help your business move forward. 

Formalize Performance Management

Changes in your workforce impact your processes and systems. So how do you keep up?

As your company shifts, you need to formalize your performance management strategy. Standardization helps ensure your company’s performance management is fair and equitable across teams, and it also establishes a consistent and objective review process for in-person, hybrid, and remote employees. 

Fortunately, people operations platforms with manager and employee tools allow you to do just that. Leaders can transform their performance management with a people operations platform by:

• Accessing key information: Managers can easily access key information like their team’s compensation and equity data, work anniversaries, and birthdays. 
• Holding engaging meetings: Leaders will know how their teams are feeling with 1:1 check-in forms that make for more productive meetings and help document individual progress.
• Improving workforce planning: Executives and team leads can view a dashboard of headcount over time to help analyze and plan to meet goals as your workforce evolves. Furthermore, with formal review processes, you can bring performance data, such as promotions, into workforce planning sessions for a clearer understanding of your people.

It’s easy to see how these formalized processes benefit employees as well. When you formalize performance management, your reviews are more transparent and less prone to recency or performance bias. Furthermore, giving your people access to their personalized performance plans, compensation package, and past 1:1 check-ins helps create a stronger and more successful employee experience. 

ChartHop’s standardized performance review templates allow both managers and direct reports to be on the same page, week after week.

If you’re scaling and leveling up your processes, consider a more robust solution. Check out our packages and features here to determine which one is right for you.

Continue Prioritizing Your Culture

Work moves fast. Unfortunately, when companies begin to scale or reduce their workforce, that initiative usually becomes the focus, not the employees or your company culture.

So while your people operations platform can be a one-stop-shop for people data, you should also use it to create a feeling of connection and engagement among employees. One way to do so is by building your Employee Directory, which captures birthdays, work anniversaries, About Me profiles, and even your people’s locations on a map. (This type of map feature is also a helpful tool for contingency planning so that People teams can respond to critical needs.)

Additionally, when your employees can access this information – and know who sits where within the organization – they’re better able to connect with the right person to get the job done. 

By prioritizing your workplace culture, you’ll signal your appreciation to your current employees, which can help retain talent and create a place where new talent wants to work.

Employee Directory features, like the ChartHop Map, bring visibility to your people and help everyone stay connected. 

Perfect Your People Ops with Your People Operations Platform

Just having a people operations platform isn’t enough. To make the most of it, you actually need to use its features in order to visualize metrics to make data-driven decisions, create a formalized performance management strategy, and engage your employees no matter where they’re located. And by proactively choosing to use its capabilities, you’re setting your employees and business up for success, now and in the future.

There’s a lot of technology choices out there. Make sure you’re investing your time, energy, and resources into the right ones. Read The Ultimate HR Tech Buyer’s Guide to see if your current tech stack is aligned with your company needs and goals.