Six people analytics metrics you should be tracking

Knowing what to track and the importance behind it is necessary to enable HR to think more strategically and build a high performing workforce to support growth and business success.

Here are six key metrics you should be tracking today.

Employee Satisfaction / eNPS

An engaged workforce is vital for high performing teams and productivity and is a key metric for HR to track. People who are proud to work for a company and who enjoy their jobs often aren’t phased by a stressful work environment and are happy to go over and above to get the job done right. So, employee satisfaction and engagement are very important, but how can you track it?

An eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) is a great way to do this, as it asks the question ‘How likely you would be to recommend [your company] to a friend?’.

Find out more about eNPS surveys here.

You can use surveys on your HR software to deliver and track responses, and feed this into your reporting to identify scorings, trends and future planning.

Of course, you might want to delve into much more detail than just an eNPS, but it’s a fantastic metric to identify engagement.

Performance

There are many ways to track performance but tracking it in some form is a key component of people analytics. You need to ensure you have high-performing employees for your organisation to grow and thrive – individual performance analytics are a great start to this.

Even performance reviews, although usually tracked, start with the best intentions but actions and logging often slip with busy workloads and increased pressures. You can make tacking much simpler by using your HR software and creating automated alerts for booking meetings and submitting information. This is a great starting point for analysing performance.

In addition to this, depending on role, you should be able to measure output, quality and experience, identify development opportunities and the success of any learning (see our Learning Success section below). These performance metrics can also help with succession planning.

In addition to this, you can track the performance of a team, manager or the organisation as a whole. Having a clear understanding of the performance of your entire organisation can help you fill any gaps, identify and solve issues and build stronger foundations for future growth.

Clear data also helps remove any bias that can be associated with performance. While there may be circumstantial considerations to take into account, tracking, monitoring and analysing performance data will enable you to get a clear picture of what’s happening.

Another critical metric for HR is the amount of non-productive effort your people are putting in. This can often be overcome by reviewing processes as it is inevitable that, over time, they may become slow and onerous, or even obsolete. For example, if your timesheets do not feed into payroll and your people must input them manually each time, you could be wasting hundreds or thousands of hours each year, depending on your headcount. Ensuring your processes are sharp and efficient, and automated wherever possible, allows you to shape a more productive workforce.

Learning Success

Putting your people through a training programme is great, especially if it’s matched to any skills shortages and personal development plans. However, providing them with the knowledge isn’t always enough.

Over time, it is natural to enter the forgetting curve, so try benchmarking skills straight after a learning session and then again at different intervals – perhaps after one month, and then three. If there is a pattern where skills levels are dropping again, consider a refresher programme or KPI’s around the learning to encourage your people to keep it at the forefront of their minds.

Employee Churn

High Performing Churn

Most organisations will track employee churn in some manner, even if it is simply the annual percentage.

We all know how it can be expensive to lose a high performing employee, but do you know the actual cost to your business?  You can find this by first identifying the percentage that the individual performed over and above the average and weighing that against your turnover. This can give you an idea of the worth of a high performer within your organisation and can assist you with any future recruitment or retention plans.

You might like: Are employee turnover rates due to increase post-pandemic?

Early Staff Turnover

We all know how frustrating it is to get a new team member up to capacity only for them to leave shortly after. If you’re spotting trends with staff turnover in the first year of employment, there could be a problem with your recruitment or onboarding process.

It’s really important to be tracking turnover at different stages of employment to help you determine the success of your processes, and you should be able to do this very easily within your HR solution.

You might like: How HR technology can improve recruitment processes

Staff Turnover for Individual Managers

It’s a well-known phrase that “People leave their managers, not their job” so it was no surprise when, last November, LinkedIn undertook research and discovered that teams with a strong management team often had a much lower staff turnover than others. When you’re monitoring your employee churn, calculate it by individual manager to identify any patterns.

This can help you spot development opportunities or even key issues among your leadership team.

Capabilities and Competencies

Identifying capabilities allows you to spot any skills gaps and resolve them. Traditionally a talent management process, it means that you can pinpoint the skills and core competencies each role requires and balance them against those that you already have in place.

When doing so, consider that it shouldn’t just be formal qualifications and training courses that feed into this. It might be softer skills, such as influencing or relationship building.

Having the knowledge you require in these areas can also enable you to formulate a stronger talent development and acquisition programme.

Absence Rates

You likely already monitor absence rates, but how you use it in people analytics is important. Most organisations simply track absence rates per individual and identify any patterns, which are then highlighted to the manager to resolve on a one-to-one basis.

However, what if there are trends within the team? Perhaps there’s a departmental or management issue that HR needs to review.

It’s also good practice to understand the true cost of absence within both your organisation and individual teams. By having a clear idea of the cost and real impact of delivery to the business, you can build this into any future business planning.