Cornerstone OnDemand has announced the addition of two new people analytics applications, Cornerstone Engage and Cornerstone Benchmark. The products are designed to give organisations deeper, real-time insight into their workforce. They both enable HR and business leaders to make decisions about ‘human talent’.
According to Adam Miller, founder and CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand: “With more than 17 years of cloud-based data, Cornerstone is at the forefront of applying analytics to workforce business decisions. Our people analytics applications give our clients real-time insights into their workforces, removing the reliance on guesswork and intuition and enabling them to more quickly take action for the health and success of their organization.”
“One of the best ways to provide optimal customer service is to ensure our employees are happy,” said Denise Domian, senior vice president of human resources at The Bon-Ton Stores. “With Cornerstone Engage, we’re opening a direct line of communication with our employees, from our executives to our sales associates. We want to get their honest feedback regularly and in a way that’s convenient for them – whether online or on their smartphones. With their feedback, we can dig into the results and look for opportunities to make positive organizational changes faster and more often.”
Why you might need Engage
The driver for both Engage and Benchmark is to enable “positive organisational health through engaged employees”. Both are part of the Cornerstone Performance Suite, which comprises cloud-based learning and human capital management software.
Cornerstone says it developed Engage in recognition of the profound effect an engaged workforce can make on a company’s bottom line. The application enables organisations to measure key employee engagement factors, such as:
- sentiment toward office culture
- satisfaction with direct managers.
Via ‘quick pulse surveys’ and traditional annual surveys, employees provide their (confidential feedback) online or on their mobile phones. The latter makes the process more accessible to employees who don’t have access to computers.
Having captured the input, organisations use a flexible dashboard to analyse the data. With the insights obtained, employers can:
- pinpoint areas of opportunity
- develop effective action plans
- track changes.
In this way, they can ensure they address employee concerns as well as drive a positive working culture. The result should be improved growth.
Why you might need Benchmark
According to Cornerstone, “benchmarks make (for) better workforce decisions”. Internal and external benchmarks provide tools to initiate data-based approaches to decision-making. However, benchmarking is often manual, time-consuming and costly. Cornerstone asserts that only 35 percent of companies say they use benchmark data to measure corporate performance and make workforce decisions.
Cornerstone has petabytes of workforce data gathered from more than 3,000 clients. This will allow the benchmarking process to become more useful, accurate, timely and cost-effective. By using Benchmark, organisations will identify and compare key HR and talent metrics, such as measuring:
- the IT department against the Finance Department
- against external users, such as comparing industry peers or companies in the same geographical location.
With the insights obtained, organisations can ask and answer deeper questions about their workforce health, including:
- workforce diversity (how gender-diverse is my workforce or how does that compare to other companies in my industry?)
- employee trends (what is the average tenure of my employees or is my organisation experiencing high levels of turnover compared to others in my industry?)
- learning and development (how do my training completion rates compare over time or is training compliance a risk at my company compared to others in my market?)
- recruiting (how does my recruiting spend compare to other companies in my region or is my company finding talent faster than others in my industry?)
What does it mean?
Cornerstone HCM already has clients, such as Bon-Ton Stores, Comerica, SiteOne, Tractor Supply Company, The Warranty Group and Wayne County Airport Authority. These are starting to use the new applications to understand critical workforce trends and, where applicable, take action. By analysing and identifying specific tendencies and disparities, they will possess real-time, transparent data. They can then shape workforce decisions and then observe their effect.
The key, especially for Benchmark, is the ability to leverage the totality of Cornerstone’s workforce data, from more than 31 million users worldwide. The caveat is observance of Cornerstone’s commitment to complete privacy. All Cornerstone Benchmark data is anonymized and aggregated before being shared externally, according to predefined and strict data privacy policies.
