What is People Insights?

At Berkshire, our People Insights team provides the analytics and consulting support your HR teams need to select, promote, and pay the best people in a way that offers equal employment opportunity to all. In today’s rapidly changing regulatory environment, many organizations find themselves unsure of how to best manage their employment decisions in a way that drives results while maintaining compliance with legal requirements. While employers have more data about their employees and organization at their fingertips than ever before, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with what to do with all that information. Employers often end up doing nothing with these data, missing out on the benefits of analyzing and optimizing these data to make better and more legally defensible decisions.   

Berkshire’s People Insights team offers services that help employers turn the vast amounts of data they have about their workforce and organization into meaningful recommendations to help leverage their most important asset – their people – while maintaining compliance and making decisions that are based in accepted legal practices. The work of our People Insights team covers all aspects of the employment life cycle, including job analysis and job description development and review, availability and employee selection process analyses, demographic utilization, opportunities assessment, turnover analyses, and pay equity analyses.  

An accurate job description that identifies the requirements for employees to effectively perform the job is critical for effective hiring and employee management. Accurate and thorough job descriptions can also play an important role in defending hiring and selection decisions when a test or assessment needs validation. The development of job descriptions is often best achieved through a job analysis, which is a systematic study of the job that yields critical information about the nature of work performed and the requirements of employees who perform the work.  

Labor market and workforce representation analyses are customized to reflect how and where an organization recruits, as well as the unique jobs and structure of that company. In addition to using Census and EEOC data, Berkshire’s People Insights team can use data from sources that reflect the labor market for the particular roles in your organization. We will work with you to develop an analysis that answers the questions important to you – this might be looking at your demographics by division, level, or reporting structure, or analyzing how different races and sexes move in and out of a particular title or section of your organization.  

The selection process is key to finding the best talent for your organization but is also an area that holds an immense amount of potential risk for employers. There is no ‘one size fits all’ selection process. The best selection process for your organization is one that allows you to hire the best person for the job, without unintentionally creating legal risk against a legally protected groups in a way that’s not job-related or defensible. Berkshire’s People Insights team can work with you to analyze all steps of your selection process, and if issues are found, work with you to identify the root causes and recommend solutions. If your selection process includes tests or assessments, our team of expert Industrial/Organizational Psychologists have experience developing, validating, and defending hundreds of tests and assessments, and will work with you to ensure that your assessments are effective and legally defensible.  

Once employees are a part of your organization, it’s important to still monitor how they move through the company and eventually leave. Berkshire’s People Insights team can analyze your data to identify if there are trends in promotions, transfers, or turnover that should be investigated, and these analyses can be customized to answer the questions you are asking. For example, are veterans or individuals with disabilities not promoting as quickly as others? Are certain race or gender groups aggregated in the lower pay grades, while other groups are being promoted at a higher rate? Are there areas of the company that have higher rates of turnover for one group than another? We will look at your data and help identify the story that the data are telling you, then help to dig deeper to find the “why” behind the story – and provide recommendations for remediation if needed.   

It is a challenging time to be an HR or compliance professional. The regulatory and compliance landscape is shifting rapidly, and we have more data available to us than ever before. Berkshire’s People Insights team can help you analyze your organization’s data to ensure effective workforce development practices while maintaining compliance and mitigating legal risk.