HR Metrics for HR Strategists

The zeal to accumulate data that can be used to help executives manage their businesses is at an all time high. Technological progress, corporate governance needs, relationship management endeavors, enhanced competitiveness, and more have led investors, managers, and employees to seek more data about their organizations. As a result, HR professionals have been intimately involved in the growth of these data depositories. Large software system implementations are providing corporate level data immediately to the desktops of multiple users. Corporate dashboards, and other forms of data sharing and reporting to senior executives and line managers, are appearing in many organizations, both large and small. Thus, access to important metrics about people is receiving more attention than ever.

But what is HR data? And are we delivering HR data to managers in a way that helps them do their jobs? Even more important, to what degree are the data we provide to executives making a real difference in the way that they do business?

What is HR Data?

There are a number of books on human capital and HR scorecards. In these books, you can read about types of HR data that are being used to understand the quality of HR services (e.g. efficiency of selection processes, compensation ratios compared to market, etc.) and basic people issues (e.g. are they absent, leaving, or using various HR services?). Overall, I think you could conclude that the most frequently used HR metrics are data ABOUT employees. We collect data about their turnover, salaries, benefits, absenteeism rates, decisions to start working for us, and more. We collect the data, and we sometimes develop ratios based on the data (e.g. hires per applicants, turnover rates, etc.).

We often supplement our archival data with employee survey data. Thus, instead of inferring things ABOUT our people from information technology (IT) sources, we ask employees to tell us about themselves. We ask if they are satisfied, engaged, how they feel about benefits, what they think about the culture, and more.

But when we reach out to employees and start asking them for data via employee surveys, there is a huge opportunity for more information that is not being seized upon by HR executives. As you develop systems to collect data ABOUT people that are FROM people (e.g. employee surveys), you also can ask those same people questions ABOUT your business.