Canadian businesses are finally waking up to the power of workforce analytics
This article was created in partnership with Rippling.
For decades, HR teams were seen as support staff, not strategic leaders. Those days are long gone, with human resources finally making its way into the boardroom - not with intuition, but with data.
“HR, like many other departments in recent years, have become very data driven,” Alex Goncalves, Managing Director at Rippling Canada, told HRD. “HR data and analytics is quite critical to driving strategic decision making, especially at the executive level.”
Canadian businesses are finally waking up to the power of workforce analytics and they’re not just using it to measure performance. From long-term headcount planning to employee engagement metrics, HR teams are being asked to anticipate the future, not just report on the past.
“You need to be able to kind of plan three months, six months, a year ahead, at what the business should look like,” said Goncalves. “Does the business actually support that currently? And, if not, what changes have to be made within the business from an HR perspective to be able to facilitate that growth or those changes?”
The result? A shift toward data maturity in HR, particularly in mid-sized and scaling companies. Goncalves sees this trend accelerating, especially in organizations trying to make sense of distributed teams and rapid hiring cycles. So what should HR leaders be watching here? Well, as always, retention is a top priority.
“Retention metrics is probably a big one in employee satisfaction,” he added. “Time to hire, so how long has a role been open, is something that HR leaders should definitely have a focus on.”
But he doesn’t stop there. Data on frontline leadership is becoming just as essential.
“Manager effectiveness, efficiency, employee engagement for specific managers is really important - something that I definitely keep an eye on as a leader.”
Even the basics such as compensation planning, compliance, expenses are getting a data-driven overhaul.
“If [businesses] are not thinking about that, especially at scale, it becomes quite cumbersome to do planning around compensation if you don't have the right tools in place,” Goncalves explains. “Employee expenses and spend – there’s always big ones. And obviously payroll cost is probably the last issue I would keep an eye on.”
This is where Rippling steps in. According to Goncalves, the platform was designed with one core belief: every data point about an employee should “ripple” across the organization in real time.
“Rippling is really, truly the only all-in-one platform built natively from the ground up, with employee data at the centre of everything that we do,” Goncalves said. “When a change happens, they move countries, get a promotion, are terminated, or add a spouse to benefits, the system automatically updates those changes to reflect the employee's new status.
“Whether that’s a third-party application or a natively built one, it ripples out those changes,” Goncalves explained. “This trickles into the analytics, so everything is up to date by the second, basically in real time.”
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