Sometimes when I watch a football or basketball game, I wonder how playmakers know the score. If I were on the field or floor, I couldn’t keep my head about me. Pulled in many directions, moving in so many different ways, crushed by the noise of the crowd, I could not tell where my team was on the scoreboard. That’s probably why I am not a sports pro. HR Managers feel the same confusion most of the time without the HR metrics that put them in the game.
Who is in charge?
Until HR Managers define and integrate metrics into their performance, they will not run their own functions. They will fire whom the boss says, hire whom the operations head wants, and run errands for the finance exec. Forgive the cynicism, but until you can frame HR metrics, implement them, and sell them to all the stakeholders, you are administering HR and not leading it. For most small and many mid-size HR functions, the metrics already exist:
1. Count the FTEs onboard.
2. Add up what they cost.
3. Calculate what the savings would be if we cut X number of them.
The focus of this discussion lies in noticing that these measures do not move things forward. They spin wheels and unwind things.
What can you do?
You need a change of heart to pursue a new direction. It takes knowledge, technology, and more than a little courage to call the plays that will put HR on the scoreboard.
1. Knowledge: Every HR principal deserves credit for immersion in compliance and legal issues. One metric each of you works under is the ability to keep the litigation wolf from the door. But, you need to do much more than the administrative tasks that you can delegate to HRIS or shift to your PEO.
As the HR records archivist, you have much information readily available. HR metrics lie in that data. It does take time to study the info, but if you seek patterns and fluctuations, you will have things to measure. If you locate where the data paths transect other data important to operations, sales, and finance, you know where to place the metric.
Visualize gauges or dials at these data traffic points, and you have key performance indicators for groups and individuals. Shane Yount of Competitive Solutions, Inc. (in a presentation to SHRM’s Annual Conference) advises making these metrics visual if you want to make accountability personal not conceptual. If you want HR metrics that matter, they have to be visible.
2. Technology: HR principals must be able to take ownership of the technology originating in or serving their functions. Technology is the single language that all business functions share. Because it already “speaks” to the other business silos, you need to master it.
You have the technology at hand to measure what performers do. Even the simplest systems let you gather, sort, and display the scores that communicate and move the performance process forward. Scorecards, leaderboards, and box scores let you chart, analyze, and report results that make other silos value your input.
3. Courage: Until you have proven your value, you are on call to do the bidding of the executive-suite. You want to position yourself to put the handwriting on the wall, to provide the reports and costing that catch attention, and the numbers on the board that tells everyone who is winning.
Without being melodramatic, you need to take charge of your own time. Your should focus on designing the metrics your peers don’t yet know they need.
So, back to the ball game! The A-players know where they are at any moment in the game. There are scoreboards to check, of course, but they also have a sense of the game’s rhythm and tension. The best of them have a connectivity that keeps them current on strengths and failures, and their experience tells them what time it is and how much time they have left. When your HR metrics can mentor that kind of performance, you are sustaining performance with values-added.