Top 10 Things to Remember When Tracking Your HR Metrics

Metrics are integral part of any business operation. If there is a process or a workflow in a system and the flow has a series of tasks, there need to be several metrics to identify the efficiency of the process and understand the efficiency of those who contribute and participate in it. Metrics are also embedded psychologically in our minds. When we dine in a good restaurant for instance, our minds quickly tend to take into consideration the quality of the food, the size of the portion served, cleanliness quotient, service and value for money for the food we ordered. We then come to an overall conclusion on our experience at the hotel and later decide if we should visit the place again or try a different restaurant. Business operations are similar. And in HR, metrics play an important role. Thanks to the incorporation of analytics in HR processes and data, metrics become all the more crucial as they directly influence the workflow procedure and its consequences. So if you are an HR associate incorporating analytics into your processes, here are the ten prime things to remember when tracking your HR metrics.

Track Absence Rate

Absenteeism is inevitable in organizations and really disrupts the workflow. Though you can consider planned leaves as negligible, unscheduled leaves can kill processes. Tracking the absence rate of an employee not just gives the concerned department an idea on project allocation but also give insights on the attitude of individual employees and recognize a pattern. The data from this metric can be used to take long term decisions and set ground rules and benchmarking standards.

Track Absence Rate per Reporting Manager

Another crucial metric that you should track is the number of employees absent under different reporting managers for a given time period. This helps you refine your data further and understand if frequent absenteeism of an employee is due to his or her attitude or due to the reporting manager.

Track Productivity Quotient

Companies no longer pay for who stays exactly from 9 AM to 5 PM and who does overtime consistently. These conventions are fading off gradually with the onset of work-from-home facilities and remote teams. Tracking the productivity of each employee can help you understand who is actually productive and who is just pretending to be. This can help you come up with an index that can help bridge wage gaps.

Track Overtime Factors

When people work overtime, they tend to turn up either late the next day or not turn up at all. When employees are working overtime consistently for a fixed duration, taking this as a metric can help you uncover insights on their productivity over time and help realize if temporary workforce to support the operational needs are actually required.

Track Employee Training Costs

This is connected directly with retrenchment and the expense incurred by companies in training an employee. When one leaves in a few weeks after training, the cost incurred by the company is significant. The company then has to incur the expenditure again to train another recruit which is also time consuming. Tracking this metric will help you understand if on-the-job training is better than classroom training and come up with alternate remedial measures.

Track Metrics on Efficiency of Training

The more effective your training is, the sooner you can get returns on the costs you incur on training. This is called efficiency of training and is particularly useful in companies where mass recruits happen every month and retrenchments too. This is also related to employee job satisfaction and should be tracked in your HR metrics.

Track Happiness of Your Employees

This is perhaps the most priceless HR metric you can ever track. The root of all things in your workplace, employee happiness increases productivity, morale and ultimately profits of your company. You should track this metric to uncover the seeping in of any office politics, management concerns, personal problems of employees, payscale issues, wage gaps, gender inequality and even commitment levels of employees to their jobs and organization. With this metric, you can bring about 75% of the positive change your organization desperately needs.

Track Resignation Rate

Most people who quit their companies never come back, no matter what their personal conditions are. Resignation rate as a metric can be useful to identify the areas requiring attention such as issues with managers, work pressure, lack of challenging tasks, intimidating teammates, unaccommodating colleagues, payscale concerns, lack of understanding of processes and more. The more you analyze this metric, the more insights you will come up with for each department and your organization as a whole.

Track Resignation of Key Employees

This can be a sub-metric of the previous metric yet a crucial one. To be honest, not all employees are valuable. When some leave, there is minimal or no disruptions in the workflow at all. Problems only crop up when the good ones leave. So you should be considering this metric to analyze why the promising and experienced employees of your organization are leaving. Is it because of better opportunities? Lack of growth? Poor appraisals? The metric could answer all of these and more.

Track Resignation per Manager

This is very much similar to absenteeism per manager and gives comprehensive ideas on why resignation under a particular manager is more when compared to that of others. This metric can be helpful in diverse ways and can fix issues on appraisal meetings, intimidating bosses, too much pressurizing, lack of rewards and recognition and deprival of work credits.

HR analytics is not simple. It is crucial and has the potential to see things an average human mind can never think of. With these metrics, you can definitely start seeing significant changes in your workplace and the more you refine your data and metrics, the better your company will evolve. If you have any other crucial metric in mind, share your thoughts on comments.

If you are looking to upskill your HR career using analytics, then Jigsaw Academy has a great course designed specifically for HR professionals.