Six key people metrics professional services firms should track

Only a small fraction of professional services businesses claim to have ‘comprehensive visibility’ into key people metrics.

Every HR professional will be able to tell you why people are an organisation’s greatest asset, from the simple bottom line of churn or disengagement costs to the incredible value that employees can bring when their talents are strategically nurtured. However, in professional services, this has a whole new layer – because your product is your people. Your value proposition to clients is the expertise of your workforce.

With this in mind, it should be a top priority for HR teams in the professional services sector to track key people metrics in order to keep a finger on the pulse of your most crucial asset.

Onboarding

According to a study by Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job of onboarding new employees, which does not bode well for these employers being able to deploy new resources quickly, let alone retain their talent long-term.

To address these challenges, your HR team may want to gather more in-depth data on your onboarding process and where it could be improved, potentially by using recruitment and onboarding software. You may achieve this through scheduled check-ins with your new hires or by getting new employees to fill in a feedback form at regular time intervals during their first few months. 

Formalising the areas you ask about while onboarding new employees, such as what new skills they think they picked up that week or who in the business they were introduced to or shadowed, will allow ample data collection and provide opportunity for any concerning patterns to be noticed.

Ramp

Studies have found that some roles can take up to 18 months for employees to fully ramp up to. There is often an understandable enthusiasm for candidates who will ‘hit the ground running’ and be able to get up to speed on current project with ease, but in many cases, this is simply unrealistic, and enforcing this expectation could damage employee engagement.

During the first months (not weeks!) of a new hire’s time at your organisation, the focus must be on learning and development. While shadowing colleagues and working with their new team are brilliant opportunities for this and fundamental to their integration, providing new hires with self-service learning resources will play a key role in ensuring veteran employees don’t have their time overburdened and your new employees are able to seize every opportunity to ramp up to their role.

Billable Utilisation

If your people are over-utilised, they are at significant risk of burnout, which place them at greater risk of churning or lower performance, which results in them providing low-quality service to clients.

Similarly, as the professional services sector often attracts highly ambitious talent, under-utilised employees are not only a significant cost to the business but also pose a high risk of turnover due to lack of desired career development.

This is why HR visibility of billable utilisation is key. When billable utilisation data is combined with sickness, absence, performance, and attrition data, your people team will be able to keep a sharp eye out for retention risks and identify areas of strength and weakness for employee engagement.

A robust integration between your HR solution and a PSA tool will be non-negotiable in this cross-referencing process. The xcd people solution work closely with Certinia, the #1 PSA tool to deliver a seamless ERP offering.

Project Profit & Margin

When HR is given visibility of potential project sales based on data in the organisation’s CRM (such as Salesforce) and visibility of employees and their capacity to take on more work through a PSA tool (such as Certinia) this can enable HR to have full visibility of data which is necessary to making informed personnel decisions. to ensure each individual talent is being nurtured according to their own skills, goals, and capacity.

A successful workforce strategy has proven itself to be a game changer across every industry, but it’s importance in an industry where your value proposition is your in-house expertise cannot be overstated. To ensure your workforce strategy takes into account the key goals of your business, HR teams need full view of bottom-line, profit, margin, and ROI.

Employee Engagement

Considering the recruitment and ramp process for new hires is so time-consuming and expensive, it’s crucial to keep an eye on employee engagement to ensure their retainment. Different organisations choose to calculate this metric in different ways but looking to the results of Net Promoter Score surveys with your workforce, absenteeism, and performance can be a good place to start.

Employee retention should be of high interest to your business’ leadership team too. Employee retention has been linked to higher customer satisfaction, supports company culture, and generates time and cost-savings. Retaining talent leads to overall better business productivity, and so leadership buy-in into the importance of this metric, and technology that supports your team’s efforts to keep it healthy are both crucial.

Learning

A recent report found 37% of the 4,500 UK and US workers surveyed said lack of learning and development was the reason they may seek employment elsewhere, with this statistic becoming even more pronounced at 44% in the younger age group (18-34 years old). Of the UK workers, 77% felt their employer could be doing more to invest in learning and development.

So, in the interest of not only retainment, but also upskilling a workforce who appear to be genuinely hungry to see consistent growth in their careers, implementing learning and development platforms should be a no-brainer metric for HR teams. From training on how to utilise emerging AI tools to gaining qualifications that add to an employee’s soft skills, it’s up to the employer to make these resources available to their workforce.

As HR has taken on a more strategic position in the workplace, the importance of data tracking and data-led decision making has become greater and greater. Every organisation will have unique priorities according to their culture, values and goals, but in every situation, the people data gathered by HR can be like gold-dust when it comes to correctly directing valuable investment, retaining hard fought for talent, and contributing to your organisation’s growth.

Learn more with our article on How HR analytics can transform the workplace.