Linking Human Resource and Business Metrics

Many organizations maintain department-specific metrics and dashboards to track their success. True organizational integration and performance demands that departments work together to identify the metrics that cross boundaries for greater success.

Here are three examples of how HR metrics and analytics can be integrated with business measures to assess human capital performance. These metrics are expressed in the form of questions, to help your organization shape its metrics to align with your needs and culture:

1. Time to full productivity: How does your organization measure the success of any one employee in terms of business outcomes? Can success be measured in terms of sales, billable hours, completed product counts or productivity rates or the number of resolved customer complaints in the fastest time? Once this metric is established for different roles, how quickly do new employees reach this level of success? This metric helps the organization assess the success of its recruiting, onboarding, and training programs when bringing in new employees.   
2. Retention and productivity measures: How does the organization assess the productivity of employees over time? Does the organization demand “up or out” success, where employees who do not progress up the ladder are encouraged to leave? Or, does your organization reward sustained steady performance over time? Is long-term retention a goal, or is turnover acceptable if productivity goals are maintained? Organizational culture plays a significant role in how metrics are framed, defined and measured.
3. Engagement measures: How does the organization measure employee engagement? How does engagement relate to organizational outcomes? How does the organization measure the improvement and impact of engagement? The concept of engagement is elusive; too often, it is interpreted as a measure of employee satisfaction, rather than through the lens of alignment between employee perception and organization performance.

Linking HR metrics and business measures requires inter-department collaboration and thoughtful reflection on the organizational culture. These three metrics are designed to facilitate these conversations – crossing departmental boundaries for organizational success.