Six HR Metrics You and Your CEO Need Now
Most of the time, it seems, HR and CEOS are like oil and water. They can’t find the right mix of what the CEO needs to run the organization and the information HR can provide toward those goals. HR has information at its fingertips and when turning that information into concise metrics can provide real time strategic direction for the CEO.
Hiring Metrics: Hiring and recruiting metrics may include how many employees are on board currently, how many people you have or will be hiring this year, the number of terminations, and the number of promotions. Yawn, so what?
Important metrics to measure are how many new hire terminations occur within the first six months to a year. Then drilling down as to the reasons these employees are leaving. Is it because you have managers who are bullies, supervisors who fail to appreciate the work of their reports, or is it because new managers are not being trained on how to manage effectively? Is it because you offer too few benefits, no training, or no career development?
Once you and the CEO have these metrics, then you can train managers on more productive behaviors including EQ, properly recognizing each team member’s contributions, offering employees better benefits and effective training and development programs.
Performance Metrics: There are jobs that provide numbers or metrics simply because of the nature of the job, for example, sales, a collections agent, and the number of widgets someone manufactures every month. Other jobs, not so much. There are performance reviews and performance items that submit to measurements such as are deadlines being met. Does Sarah get the newsletter out on time now? Is Bob making fewer errors than his last review indicates? Still other performance items are more difficult. These may call for assessments. For example, you will see individual scores from individual assessments and have a two-fold application and here’s how it works. Before hiring individuals, you administer assessments to your top two to three candidates. Out of that group, the one who is hired now has an assessment on file. In two to five years, you can easily administer the assessment once again to compare scores and see how much the employee is improving – or not. If the employee is not improving, perhaps they are in the wrong job. However, administering the assessments before hire help to virtually eliminate this factor. Taking this a step further, you can take the assessments even further and combing them into a team report to create and develop better teams. See an example team report here.
The application of these metrics is now available for a collaboration for real world solutions to bring to the CEO.
Opinions Matter
At least once a year, survey executives and all management levels to find out what their idea of the most troublesome talent issue might be. Executives may feel it is the lack of innovation in talent. Directors may feel is the lack of process or project management skills. Mid-level managers may offer the lack of job knowledge. Lower level managers or supervisors may think it is a lack of engagement or motivation.
It is always interesting to see how much agreement or lack of consensus there may be. The lack of consensus may make your job more difficult in supplying the metrics. However, another survey can be administered asking for prioritization on these topics and the picture on hat metrics to gather will become crystal clear.
Speaking of Innovation
Diversity metrics are important. Are your customers or clients seeing or hearing people they can relate to or does your customer service front line all look alike? Is your marketing team all young graduates? Is your sales team all males? If the company strategic plan is to go global within the next two years, what do your diversity metrics reflect right now? What do they need to reflect? In addition, remember that diversity is a catalyst for innovation. No company can exist today doing the same thing and never making any changes just ask Kodak, Blockbuster, and Nokia, just to name a few.
Technology Metrics
How much is your company spending on technology? If your HR Department needs technology to provide metrics to the CEO, then ask for it. You will need to present both cost metrics and ROI metrics to the executive team. In addition, if you can provide metrics for technology that is not working or no longer needed to pay for the technology you need to help your department align with the strategic plan, all the better.
More Technology Metrics
If part of the organization’s strategic plan is to sell, buy, or use more technology, what are the metrics showing currently? Researching similar organizations and product/service lines, where does your organization stand? What metrics will serve to illustrate to the CEO that according to the strategic plan, you are in need of increased IT staff. technology, or more technological training in order meet the strategic plan and compete with the market place?
Recently I was on a panel addressing the needs of job searchers and one of my colleagues was discussing the importance of making a “To Do” list. Another colleague added the idea that job seekers (and everyone) should also make an “What I Did.” These are wiser words than y might think. As an HR executive, you would be wise to inform your CEO about every six months of the items you and your department have accomplished contributing to the strategic plan.
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