There are so many metrics that can be tracked. But are they all necessary? Especially at the executive level? Certainly at the senior HR level there are many metrics you will want to track.
Some companies use a balanced business score card – some HR organizations do as well. These are another way of tracking critical metrics but are more geared towards completion of objectives than straight numeric targets. You may use both.
Over on HR On Your Desktop, we have a whole section on metrics – and these are only a sampling.
So how do you decide and what does your dashboard look like? You should be guided by key metrics that you develop during the strategic and annual planning cycles. If turnover is high and you are taking corrective steps, dashboarding voluntary turnover should be prominent as well as the cost of that turnover. Nothing gets the attention of executives more than the cost to replace someone. If you are growing a company and need headcount to hit production or sales growth, then displaying status of headcount against plan should be on your dashboard. Are your medical costs high? Have you been hit with increases lately? You might want to dashboard the monthly cost vs the budget so there is early warning to future increases.
My dashboards often show a target and an actual and are clickable through history so you can see changes over time. There is usually a trend indicator as well – interesting to know if you are over or under target for a key metric. Dashboards should also be able to drill down through broad categories to see detail if needed. Suppose for example, salary level of your technical workforce is important to the CEO (the company wants to make sure it remains competitive to attract talent). If average salary to market is above or below, a backup dashboard with more detail should just be a click away.
Excel is a good medium for building your dashboard as most HRIS systems can off-load data into Excel fairly readily. The frequency of your dashboard is up to your audience. You may want to review it weekly, but your audience may only need it monthly or quarterly.
Choosing the right metrics is critical to help let management know when there are problems or hot spots that may impact operations. Dialoguing at the beginning of the year with senior management is important in constructing your dashboard. Remember, you are the expert, so they will need guidance from you on what must be measured. Remember too that dashboards can and should change over time as milestones are met and new metrics require tracking. Retaining historical data is strongly advised so that executives (especially new ones) can see progress and history for perspective.
Dashboards can be elaborate or simple – the point is to make sure you have the key metrics displayed in an easy to read manner, with your targets, actuals and a trend clearly visible so that a sense of direction can be seen.
Jim Egan is a HR executive with more than 25 years’ HR experience, most recently with SEMATECH, the global semiconductor R&D consortium. Jim is the founder/ editor of HRNewsFeeds and @HRNewsFeeds on Twitter, the leading source of HR news and jobs in cyberspace.
