It takes a certain selflessness to succeed as a Human Resources professional. That is not as noble as it may sound. Leaders are often prized for stepping back to let their results speak for them. They are tasked with identifying measures of Human Resources effectiveness, naming the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of those measures, and communicating them effectively. In an informative and practical presentation at SHRM’s 2014 Conference, Conrad A. Samuels, SPHR (Manager, Talent Acquisition at Pepco Holdings, Inc.) addressed the art of Developing and Effectively Using an HR Dashboard. Structuring your work to speak for you means building a better HR dashboard.
What’s a dashboard?
In the tech world, a dashboard displays the information needed to report and motivate progress towards performance goals. A dashboard captures and consolidates everything happening in the moment on a single screen.
The single screen presents the KPIs in a single user-friendly event. If the dashboard requires scrolling, it is not doing its job. The best dashboards engage human curiosity. They appeal to all observers yet satisfy individual curiosities. So, creating effective dashboards is as much an art as a skill.
Caretaker to partner
Speaker Samuels sees the HR dashboard as a natural outcome of the evolution of Human Resources from the days when it was a caretaker to its role as strategic partner, from a focus on employee records to accountability for cost-effectiveness and employee development.
That evolution also appears in the development of HR metrics. Data-driven management is evidence-based management, so HR finds itself responsible for workforce analytics reported through Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS).
Why bother?
Well, for starters, it’s your job. Stakeholders expect Human Resources to draw a picture of the links between HR initiatives and business objectives. When leadership has the information it needs, its behavior and decisions should improve. That alone should quantify HR’s impact on the bottom line.
This strategic support shifts the focus on “What we have in Common, not what we have in Conflict.” As dashboards inform the organization, they “drive accountability into the conversations.” As shared news becomes common news, it becomes the organization’s common language.
What’s the score?
HR wants to measure and report the things that employer and employee want to know: How are we doing? The dashboard is not a current snapshot because a snapshot is too static. The right sort of dashboard is designed to be vivid and dynamic. It lets users drill down into the display to review the current human-capital metrics.
Measuring human performance is not the same as following piecework or production lines. On the other hand, business organizational goals can lead you to aligned KPIs. For example, the corporation values costs, quality, customer satisfaction, productivity, time, and performance management. Anything worth measuring measures one of these factors.
When, where, and how?
Your next challenge is to figure out who you are informing, when you want to do it, and how you want to reach them. The who, when, and how may be decisions you want to share with executive leadership, especially where a given audience may be overwhelmed by too much information posted too frequently. However, executive offices may want the data immediately and ongoing.
An Excel spreadsheet may be the easiest way to go. On the other hand, it appears static and so ordinary that it might be dismissed as just another busy report. Like a leaderboard, it is a flat and predictable roll out. Something more visually involving, varying in color, and utilizing useful charts will engage more observers productively. You can customize a quality HRIS system to generate everything you need.
What’s in it for HR?
Human Resource and executive leadership benefit from detailed reports. The deep data identifies benchmarks and brings them forward as visual patterns and charted correlations. Demonstrated trends become predictive when corroborated by KPIs. And, when linked with costs up or down, they become meaningful. As Samuels remarked, “Measuring is a journey, not a destination.”
Quality conceived HR dashboards raise the HR profile. For one thing, there is a psychological reward in having one’s curiosity satisfied. When employees see the current performance, it satisfies their want to know where and with whom they stand. When the organization’s leadership examines the pictured information, it strengthens their respect for, dependence on, and appreciation of the Human Resources initiative involved in a better HR dashboard.