Wide usage of data for identifying best employees’ motivation is more than priority. It formulates data culture in the company – evidently, as a consequence of data strategy. Strategy and culture are among the primary levers to maintain organizational viability and effectiveness. If the company from up to down clearly formulates data usage as a priority for improving working environment, then clear defined goals are formulated and all-company activity is coming from new shared assumptions and group norms.

                 High performance on the job is not always depending on educational background of the employee. Many companies favor job candidates with stellar academic records from prestigious schools: it gives a strong hope of high added-value of employees’ potential. But it is not the strongest point nowadays.

                Different researches show that a demonstrated ability to take initiative is a far better predictor of high performance on the job than other factors. Where these conclusions are coming from? Quantitative analysis. Especially in big companies, analysis of congregated data regarding successfully implemented projects and key contributors of it at different stages may bring surprisingly new understanding of what kind of people you need for your company.

                In our work with companies who implement data analytics for studying and improving employee’s satisfaction and, as a consequence, performance rate, we have seen best practices emerge for using analytics to manage people. These practices start from a strong commitment of top-management to provide a healthy data-based feedback to the employees regarding their performance, needs and requests.

                Hardly working on providing best ERP decisions and change management consulting, we evidenced that these companies who along with starting their ERP implementation consequently create data culture in the company, studying to collect and process the right data about critical processes in the company are much more successful than the companies perceiving their ERP as “advanced accounting systems”.

                Data culture starts from a fundamental principle of using unique solid source of data [this link directs to “Single Source of Truth”] for the core processes in the companies and identifying necessary key-data for operational and strategic business decision-making. Depending on the business, critical business data may be different: sales and pipeline forecasting, purchasing forecasting, production orders, stock transfers etc.

                All these processes are ultimately managed by people. More or less the same processes in different companies with similar business models and size have different grade of the efficiency. And the efficiency of employee may be analysed from different perspectives from your business data. SAP Business One Process Diagrams show the example of data that may be successfully used for understanding business and general employee’s performance: