Employee Turnover Analysis

In Part 1, Data Storytelling Concepts, you learned about the theory and principles of data storytelling. In Part 2, Looker Studio Features and Capabilities, you familiarized yourself with Looker Studio. This chapter is the first of Part 3, Building Data Stories with Looker Studio, which demonstrates how to apply what you’ve learned to build effective Looker Studio reports through a series of examples. This chapter will walk you through the process of building a detailed multi-page report for analyzing the employee turnover of a fictitious company. The report will highlight various factors affecting employee turnover in a particular year. We will be following the 3-D approach to data storytelling defined in Chapter 1, Introduction to Data Storytelling, to build the report: determine, design, and develop. First, you will understand the example scenario and the importance of analyzing employee turnover in a company. Then, you will build the report step...

Technical requirements

To follow the implementation steps for building the example report in this chapter, you need to have a Google account so that you can create reports with Looker Studio. It is recommended that you use Chrome, Safari, or Firefox as your browser. Finally, make sure Looker Studio is supported in your country (https://support.google.com/looker-studio/answer/7657679?hl=en#zippy=%2Clist-of-unsupported-countries).

You can access the example report at https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/c54a3754-0300-4661-9dd6-e3c46627adf9/preview, which you can copy and make your own. The data source for the report can be viewed at https://lookerstudio.google.com/datasources/6bbc47b8-fe1d-4a53-80f0-318d6c90525c.

Describing the example scenario

Employee turnover refers to the number of employees who leave a company in a given period. Employees leave an organization either voluntarily through resignation or retirement or involuntarily through layoffs, firings, removal of their position, and so on. Employee turnover is sometimes interchangeably discussed with employee attrition or churn. However, these two phenomena are distinct in a key way. With turnover, the employer intends to replace the employees who left. On the other hand, attrition refers to a scenario where the employees who left will not be replaced by the company. In addition, attrition occurs only when employees leave voluntarily to retire, go to school, work for a new company, and so on. On the other hand, turnover encompasses both voluntary and involuntary loss of employees.

Employee turnover results in heavy costs. Hiring new talent and onboarding them effectively is expensive. Research by Allied HR shows that, on average,...

Building the report - Stage 1: Determine

The first stage of the data storytelling approach involves determining the business questions to answer, identifying the target audience, and finding and understanding the data needed to build the report.

The target audience of the report is primarily the HR leaders, who like to delve into the employee turnover patterns and how various employee and job attributes are associated with and influence voluntary attrition and involuntary turnover. The target audience primarily wants to understand the who, when, and why of the employee turnover phenomenon. The key business questions that the HR executives like to answer include the following:

• How do we compare against the industry benchmark?
• What are the cost and productivity implications of employee turnover?
• At what rate did we lose our star employees compared to others?
• When did employees leave the company regarding their association with the company?
• What are the top...

Building the report - Stage 2: Design

In the design stage, you identify and define the key metrics needed to perform the analysis. You choose the right visualization types to present the data effectively. Then, you design the layout of the report and determine key interactive elements that may be needed. The idea is not to flush out every single detail in this phase; instead, it is to create the overall narrative and identify key elements, making sure the high-level design meets the needs of target users. It also often happens that some of the design decisions made in this stage may have to be modified or adapted during development, to improve their overall effectiveness and visual appeal. The extent of changes usually depends on both the level of thoroughness of the design process, as well as unforeseen technical challenges that arise during development. It is in this phase that you may also look at the data more closely and identify any data preparation and cleansing needs.

Note...

Building the report - Stage 3: Develop

Beyond the high-level design considerations made in the previous stage, implementing the report involves deliberations on details such as report theme and styling configurations, additional user interactions, calculated fields needed, and so on.

Setting up the data source

First, we must connect to the dataset using the data.world community connector and create the data source. Follow these steps:

1. From the Looker Studio home page, select Create | Data source.
2. On the Connectors page, search for and select the data.world partner connector and rename the data source Employee Turnover.
3. If this is the first time you are using this connector, you need to authorize Looker Studio to use it:

Figure 8.4 – Authorizing Looker Studio to use the partner connector

4. Clicking the Authorize button prompts you to allow the data.world connector to access your Google account (used with Looker Studio):
...

Summary

In this chapter, you developed a detailed report for analyzing a fictitious company’s employee turnover to address the HR department’s business questions. You used a public dataset available on the open data community called data.world. You followed the three-step approach to building data stories. First, you determined the target audience, their objectives, the questions they want to get answered, and the data available and needed for the analysis. Next, you defined the key metrics, chose the right visualizations to present data effectively, identified the filters and interactions needed to meet the objectives, and created wireframes for the report pages. Finally, you went through the report development process and reviewed many of the implementation considerations, including creating calculated fields and parameters, chart configurations, and other report elements. In the next chapter, we will work on a different example and use a dataset from Google BigQuery...