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The HR department hasn’t always gotten the respect it deserves considering how much it encompasses and how hard it is to get right. It involves both processes and people and spans the entire spectrum of company performance.
But that’s all started to change. Now, HR departments are increasingly setting and tracking human resources key performance indicators (KPIs) to not only show the overall performance of different policies, but also to explain how they are contributing to the business.
This article walks you through the human resources KPIs you need to track to make the biggest impact on your company.
Human resources KPIs are common HR functions that you can track and measure over a period of time to get actionable insight. They reflect the overall performance of the company as well as the performances of various departments and individuals.
KPIs need to form part of your wider human resource planning strategy rather than being standalone objectives. That’s why you need to put some thought into the process before you start.
You can’t track everything effectively. You need to focus on a manageable number of performance metrics. To identify which HR KPIs make the most sense for your company, consider what stage you’re in.
If you’re not hiring at the moment, you don’t need to worry about how much it costs or how long it takes to recruit a new employee.
Or if you’re just getting started and don’t have an official training program in place, you don’t need to worry about tracking that particular human resource management metric.
If you’re trying to track all of your human resources metrics manually, you’ll either end up with inaccurate data, or you’ll spend all of your time collecting data and no time analyzing and optimizing.
The right HR software and tools can collect this data automatically and produce reports you can use to gain insight and make improvements.
Human resources professionals have a seemingly endless list of tasks and HR functions to carry out. This means it can be easy to get caught up in the day to day of running an HR department and leave strategic human resource management tasks for some time in the future, when you have more time.
To make sure your human resources performance measurements don’t fall by the wayside, appoint an owner, and make that person responsible for overseeing the tracking and reporting of these KPIs. Make these tasks part of that employee’s own goals or objectives for the year as well.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the KPIs your business can track. Instead, we’ve focused on human resource KPI examples that will be most beneficial to your company.
When you’re creating a staffing plan, one of the key elements is ensuring you have a timeline in place for when you will have upskilled existing staff or recruited new workers to fill any skills gaps.
You need to track the time it takes to hire an employee so you can understand how long it will take to recruit the necessary skill set, whether that be one new hire or 10.
Recruitment and talent acquisition are costs centers, so it’s important to keep time to hire down. There are two steps you can take to make sure you are effectively tracking this KPI.
It’s much more costly to hire new employees than it is to retain existing talent. You also don’t want your top talent to walk out the door with all of their knowledge and experience and end up working at one of your competitors.
That’s why it’s important to track talent retention, so you can take action before you start leaking your best employees.
A high percentage of employee turnover can cause major disruption in your business (and it suggests you’re getting something very wrong). Here are some steps you can take to track talent retention.
If you want to retain your talent, you need to make sure your employees are motivated and satisfied. Many companies forget to track this important KPI.
It can be easy to (mistakenly) believe that just because employees aren’t raising their heads above the parapet to complain, they are satisfied. Oftentimes, the only time an HR professional or company realizes an employee isn’t happy is when they hand in their notice.
Make sure you’re ahead of the game and can address any issues before they become serious enough to cause your employees to quit. Here’s how.
When an employee doesn’t show up to work, it’s a big deal. It may be for a valid reason, but if it's last minute, it’s still going to have an impact on your business. Someone else needs to cover their work, you might miss deadlines, or coworkers can get grumpy because they have to work late.
While efficient workforce planning should mean you have a policy in place to reduce disruption, you can’t prepare for every eventuality (such as four people in a five-person team all calling in sick the same day).
You should try to minimize absenteeism at your business, but before you can do that, you need to get a read on the current situation: Is it happening a lot? Here’s how to find out.
To run a successful business, you need all of your employees to perform to the best of their abilities, but that doesn’t always happen.
Tracking performance measures and carrying out performance reviews should give employees a target to work toward and a way to demonstrate how they are contributing to the business.
You can also use the data obtained from employee performance reviews to determine rewards and bonuses in a fair way.
While there is no one right way to measure performance, and it will likely take a bit of trial and error, here are our recommendations for how to do it effectively.
Businesses often neglect training because they see it as a cost center and struggle to measure return on investment. But providing learning and development opportunities not only boosts morale and helps reduce turnover, it can also plug skills gaps and ensure you remain competitive in the market.
Providing training is not enough. You need to provide the right training in the right way. And if it’s not effective, you need to make changes. Here are some tips to help you understand if your training is producing results.
Providing a comprehensive benefits package is one of the most important HR best practices when it comes to attracting and retaining talent and ensuring they are motivated to do their best work. It shows your employees that you care about their wellbeing.
But it can also be costly -- and a waste of time if your employees aren’t interested in the benefits provided, or think the contributions are too much. Benefits don’t have to include pet insurance and free laser eye surgery.
It’s important to keep on top of which benefits are resonating with your employees as well as which ones your business can afford to offer. Here’s how.
From an HR perspective, tracking employee productivity is less about looking at individual workers and how they are performing, and more about getting an overall picture of the number of staff and type of employees you need to effectively run the business.
As a key part of your workforce analytics strategy, measuring employee productivity can help ensure you have the right skills on hand when they are most needed, and avoid understaffing or overstaffing.
Unlike manual labor, where each worker contributes directly to the end product, it can be difficult to track employee productivity when it comes to knowledge work. There are ways to do it effectively, though.
Just because you’re the HR professional doesn’t mean you decide on the human resources KPIs by yourself. Get input from other departments and find out how they work; talk to management; get feedback from employees.
This will help you make a more meaningful impact and get important insight that contributes to the success of the business.
Our Small Business Expert
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