Cross-tabulation is one of the most useful tools in people analytics. Cross-tabulation analysis enables people leaders to identify relationships between insights and categorical data collected through employee surveys. It can help organizations determine attrition risks, engagement drivers, trends, and differences in employee experience (EX) across demographic groups. This data then helps companies take the right actions to improve EX and, ultimately, business outcomes.
What is Cross-Tabulation?
Cross-tabulation, or crosstabs, sorts employee survey data in an easily understandable table based on certain selected respondent criteria. For example, a company could break down its survey results by job level and region to compare respondent answers across those demographics. In this example, you could see how hourly employees, associates, managers, directors, and vice presidents from North America, Asia, and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) compare based on survey categories or questions.
Essentially, it allows your organization to investigate specific datasets at a more granular level to identify patterns, trends, commonalities, or disparities in responses. This functionality enables users to more closely examine relationships across the data that might be easily overlooked but that are highly beneficial when making data-based decisions to improve the employee experience.
In the Perceptyx platform, users can filter responses in a multitude of different ways to compare demographic results based on ethnicity, gender, age, job role, region, high potential, and more. Before diving into crosstab analytics, it is best to know what questions you want answered or what information you seek, so you have a good understanding of what demographics to sort by and what filters you need to add. Crosstabs and filters can be found from the main dashboard in the Perceptyx platform.
The Benefits of Using Crosstab Analytics
In today’s highly competitive, employee-centric market, utilizing crosstab analytics can provide myriad useful information that will help organizations make data-based decisions. These decisions lead to numerous benefits for companies and their employees.
- Crosstabs reduce errors. Analyzing large sets of data is complicated, so by breaking it down into smaller subgroups, it can be less cumbersome. The data can be more easily interpreted when grouped into manageable subsets, creating a more efficient and more effective analytical process.
- Crosstab analysis can uncover valuable insights that might otherwise go unnoticed. Because you can create multiple groupings and demographic slices of data, your organization can learn a lot. Cross-tabulation analytics will uncover granular, valuable, and specific insights that identify relationships between categorical variables and demographic groups.
- The insights are highly actionable. Because the information is filtered down thoroughly, the insights gleaned are specific enough to be easily acted on. They also provide hard data to back up decision-making and improvement strategies.
In one real-life example from a Perceptyx customer, a food services organization in the Midwest identified that they were experiencing higher-than-average attrition. Because of the conditions of the labor market in their area, the company was not able to increase compensation, so it needed to rely on other aspects of the employee experience to retain its people. They used cross-tabulation to identify groups of people likely to leave the organization in the next 12 months, and then they were able to dig deeper to figure out why those people were likely to leave. Surprisingly, they found that drivers or intent-to-leave had very little to do with pay and benefits. Therefore, they were then able to create targeted action plans to increase retention across specific employee groups.
Crosstab Analytics and the Perceptyx Platform
At Perceptyx, we know the importance of people analytics and using data to drive decision-making and action planning. Crosstab analytics helps uncover relationships between variables and collect insights from employee surveys that help organizations create a better employee experience and drive better business outcomes.
Through this functionality, Perceptyx helps organizations gather improved insights and deliver better action plans based on demographics. For more information on how your company can utilize cross-tabulation to dive deeper into your survey results and improve business outcomes, reach out to Perceptyx to schedule a demo.