It is becoming important for Human Resource professionals to use numbers, data, and statistics to show trends in employee management and engagement. Mayo notes “Workforce analytics includes all data and ratios derived from our HR database of employees. It works with facts, always assuming that the data in the system is correct.“ A difficulty is consistent job categorisation, which is important in workforce planning. Also, the lack of breakdowns on reasons for leaving the company leaves out important information when looking at engagement initiatives. “The data enables us to calculate ratios and trends, which provides us with much more useful information than the cold numbers themselves. Turnover and absenteeism are presented as ratios, but are not always calculated in consistent ways. Three- or six-month averages are generally recommended.”(Mayo) Data enables a company to calculate trends and ratios, which provides much more useful information than numbers themselves.
“Many HR initiatives do not have direct impacts on costs or revenues, even though they aim at business improvement. One should not try and measure an outcome where less than 50% of the impact on it is likely to be due solely to the effect of the project.” (Mayo) A company should set realistic measurable objectives that can be attributable. Some of this may be knowledge based, but many will be measured by opinions and feelings.
Productivity therefore is a very important metric and often overlooked by HR. Measuring productivity has never easy, but improving it is