Identifying a clear HR challenge that has a direct impact on business outcomes is an important step for any People Analytics initiative. A direct business connection ensures that the initiative gains top management attention and receives adequate funding and support.

FlixBus had identified the critical issue of employee retention in order to achieve the company’s growth goals and reduce recruitment costs.

Based on the identified HR challenge, it is critical to identify the data sets that contain the relevant information to address that challenge. In addition, it is important to validate the quality of the data to ensure correct results.

For the challenge of employee retention, it was best to use data from employee surveys that FlixBus conducts on a regular basis. After collecting the relevant datasets from 2015 to 2017, functionHR integrated them into a cohesive database and ensured their overall quality (e.g., missing data, changing questions, standardizing different scale types).

Since 2017, functionHR has also been operating the quarterly employee survey at FlixBus using the modern Survey Platform. This way, KPIs and analyses are delivered in real time during the survey.

The appropriate analytical models must be selected from the wide range of statistics and machine learning methods available today. In the context of employee retention, FlixBus and functionHR decided to use three types of analysis:

1. First, descriptive statistics were used to track KPIs typically reported by FlixBus’ HR team.

2. Second, advanced statistical techniques were used to identify and assess the drivers of employee engagement. Furthermore, finer-grained analyses of individual drivers (e.g., specific leadership behaviors) were created to derive specific HR practices and initiatives.

3. In addition, artificial intelligence was used to automatically classify the content of free-text comments into topics.

The practicability of any People Analytics initiative depends on the ability to clearly visualize and communicate key findings to internal stakeholders. To navigate through HR data and perform People Analytics at any time (e.g., during meetings), functionHR provided interactive dashboards via the Analytics Platform.

The Analytics Platform is a web-based software environment that allows FlixBus’ managers to log in and analyze HR data in real time.

An important feature is that it enables specific access controls that allow the restriction of each user’s ability to view and analyze data. For example, while C-level management has full access to all data and analytics, middle and lower managers (e.g., business unit and team leaders) are only granted access to their unit’s results. The individual units are also compared with the company-wide results. In the interests of transparency, all other employees have access to an integrated digital report via the FlixBus intranet.

By granting access to detailed analytics of every key driver of employee retention, FlixBus’ management and HR team were able to identify effective HR interventions. For example, the quality of leadership had a very strong impact on retention. More specifically, some dimensions of leadership (e.g., feedback behavior) were more important than others.

Based on these findings, FlixBus knew not only that leadership was important in general, but also how much more important it was compared to other drivers (e.g., smart goals). In addition, FlixBus also learned which specific leadership behaviors were most promising in terms of increasing employee retention.

Overall, the decision-makers were confident that the changes they were aiming for would be successful, as the necessary empirical findings had been presented in detail via the Analytics Platform.