Benchmarking & Measurement

"Complete business process review by June 2010" and "Implement customer relationship management system by December 2009" and "New workplace safety policy in place" are NOT performance measures, despite how often they appear as such in business and strategic plans and despite what many performance measure practitioners and experts might say.

Workforce metrics and analytics have been a buzz topic within the HR profession for the past 5+ years.  Those companies who have recognized the importance have invested in analytics systems and people to run those systems (fewer have invested in the people to actually perform the analytics, but that’s another blog for another day).  Dashboards have been created, reports rolled out, and presentations delivered on the state of human capital.  The frequency of these publications varies from annually to quarterly to monthly.

It happens all the time: we inadvertantly measure the same thing, more than once in our businesses and end up with two or more different versions of the truth.

Not only does it waste effort in the measurement process, but it wastes time in decision making. Which version of the truth do you trust?

There’s no question that employee engagement continues to be a hot topic amongst senior leaders these days as the economy continues to struggle through what appears to be the bottom of its hole and companies place more focus on improving productivity. The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) has found strong correlations between engaged workforces and high-performing ones, which is probably why that amidst layoffs and stock plunges engagement has become all that more important.

In a recent engagement study we did with the ASTD, we asked how companies measure engagement. Some of the most common responses are pretty obvious and standard, such as asking in exit interviews and tracking turnover, but neither of those are particularly good at tackling the problem before employees quit.