6 HR Analytical Metrics Necessary to Integrate in Uncertain Year 2024

There’s probably no point in repeating why it’s important for HR not to underestimate data-driven management. Fortunately, the situation is slowly changing also in the Czech conditions, and for many people managers, so-called “people analytics” is becoming a sought-after area for efficiency and experimentation. If you’re getting into their secrets, there is a comprehensive article just for you.

Although, in the vast majority of cases, the most important data will come from about three tens basic metrics, don’t forget the specific, less traditional ones.

Why? Because this year will focus on a number of specific areas such as motivation, change management or process and cost efficiency. And you should be ready. If the CEO or CFO asks for some data, you’ll look it up in the dashboard including several months of history.

So, here are a few metrics that will please especially larger companies with more complex team structure.

1) Retention rate per manager

2024 is likely to be the year of great changes. Teams will be reshuffled, new process settings will be sought-after and structure of manager positions will be changed. All this in an economic environment that continues to operate with few unemployed, expensive labour and a lack of available talents in the market.

Therefore, the employee retention should be watched more closely. The number of colleagues disappearing from the teams is probably tracked by every personal manager based on offboarding statistics. However, it’s surprising that this number isn’t analysed in more details.

Firstly– not every situation, when the employee leaves the job, is equally painful for the company. It can cause that the company is either slowed down or more developed. This means monitoring the leaves, in particular where there was a competency fit, and A+ talents.

Secondly– the dynamics of retention is significantly different for each department. Then it’s a good idea to work with a variety of retention thresholds to know if you’re “within the limit” for a given team.

Thirdly– it’s also helpful when retention is related to a specific management set-up, especially when it’s undergoing a significant change. It’s precisely in times of personnel changes that a sudden upsurge of leaving jobs can be a clear indicator that something is wrong at one of the levels.

Do you know, what is the best about it? You don’t have to wait for a man to leave. You can monitor satisfaction or dissatisfaction under a particular manager simply as part of satisfaction questionnaire. You’ll learn more elegantly than from some gossip about the fact that somewhere a team leadership has failed to be set up in a way that it’s functional and emotionally and professionally acceptable.

2) Talent acquisition and retention over branding spent

Employee branding. Probably the most often used phrase that occurs in the email conversation between HR and marketing. Avoidance of responsibility for the ever-increasing budget to support branding activities is noticed, as well as the measurement of the effect is unclear too.

Be frank- do you know if better communication and investment in branding bring you more quality candidates? If you have established “AAA label” or “talent” identification within recruiting and subsequent people management, then there’s nothing easier than measuring the investment in employee branding and its real impact on candidate quality.

And not only within the process of recruitment. If you’re patient enough, you can give useful advice to marketing based on long-term monitoring of the success of talented candidates coming from a particular campaign. The reason is that really soon you’ll find out that it’s often the fault of the campaign which sets unrealistic expectations and the clash with reality then results in one thing- the candidate’s leaving.

By the way- don’t be afraid to ask the successful ones also years later why they considered the company attractive. If it was just a successful campaign, they will certainly remember it.

3) Feedback over time

We’ve already mentioned feedback and mood monitoring several times. After all, continuous monitoring of “happiness” or “satisfaction value” is one of the basic metrics for long-term feedback monitoring at the level of individual colleagues.

However, they can become a bad master- if we use a simple scoring scale, quite often they can become only a routine overview without a proper context. It’s therefore important to keep an eye on another metric- and that’s the overall frequency of providing feedback. It means whether they have a chance to give feedback often enough (but not too often), not only in the form of automated questionnaires but also during meetings with managers.

Particularly in companies that are larger than a single office and with different types of contracts, this metric can help you identify grey zones, such as entire teams or workplaces where feedback isn’t used as much as it should be. At the same time, you can use it to monitor critical touchpoints, for example at bigger transformations.

4) Returns on HR software

Would you like to get rid of never-ending discussions with CFO about your HRIS platform being a waste of money and if it makes sense to invest in it? If you’re really serious about data-driven HR, you have to accept that technology costs will make increasingly large part of your budget. There’s no reason to close your eyes to the expenses. On the contrary, be a careful manager and see if and how are the expenses on processes saved.

Metric can consist of simple recruiting efficiency monitoring, hours saved on HR agenda on the part of HR staff and people in the company, as well as the use of potential in case of employee development. Of course, the numbers will always be a bit of “homemade”, but if you monitor them consistently, it will tell you something about the savings HRIS brings in.

5) Unfulfilled potential

Unfortunately, competency models are still a big unknown in the Czech conditions. They’re one of the most interesting data sets for your people analytics. Only when you work with them, you can deal with employee journey with great accuracy. The moments that many people consider “irreversible”- such as a key employee leaving the job unexpectedly because of better offer- can be identified well in advance.

At the same time, the competency models help you work with a hidden potential of your teams. Let’s take a look at the most widely used metric of “overall task effectiveness” which is based on simple measuring of KPI performance for a given employee. But it only has meaningful value for a particular current team setup which is considered to be unchangeable.

On the other hand, working with metrics, that measures unfulfilled potential, argues against this logic: It works with the highest possible potential within the team setting so that KPIs can be fulfilled and then looks for the effectiveness of the detail. This is the key for change management.

How to measure the unfulfilled potential? It’s simple. Within the competency models, work with the competences that don’t have a direct impact on successful performance of the tasks and just lie dormant. The greater their share of the total competences in their category is, the greater the unfulfilled potential is and therefore the possibility to grow within the field as well; but also the more significant probability of losing the person due to unfulfilled potential.

6) Adaptation rate

This is another really useful metrics especially needed when you change the settings of running processes. In case of a long-term transformation, it’s really important tool: it helps identify stuck processes quickly and, on the contrary, highlight those that were implemented according to the plan and we can learn from them.

How to measure it? Each transformation goal should have a set of metrics that monitors its success. A simple example- if a company starts time tracking for the first time, this metrics will be the number of complete timesheets closed on time.

The adaptation rate then simply tracks the change of the goal over time or it can measure the number of employees who meet the goal within the given area compared to those who haven’t fallen under it (e.g. they don’t track time, the tracking isn’t complete or they close it late).

The effectiveness of training or the team’s overall resistance to change should be immediately recorded in the metrics.

How to “measure differently” successfully?

Everyone who has started working with data analysis will sooner or later run up against the problem. He won’t complain about the lack of data but about the amount of information he’s able to get by combining them.

Remember two golden rules: “Don’t combine data just for more data”, and “Combine data for results”. In other words- if you know that you need to achieve a specific outcome in your strategic planning and data can help you achieve it, then don’t be afraid to go down the untrodden paths. Even the most famous and most used data indexes were formed this way- someone was looking for a solution and the data could point the way.