building an HR dashboard
Reporting for duty
It feels like we were just ringing in the New Year…how did we get to the end of January so quickly?
I hope your year is off to a great start. You’ve been aligning resources and building plans to execute your goals, right? Good. Now comes the tough part… no, I am not talking about execution. Rather, I am referring to the one thing we all absolutely dread…yes, that’s right, reporting on our progress towards our goals. Let’s face it: few people like building reports; it feels like just another administrative thing that needs to get done. But the bottom line is we all need good information to make decisions. Effective reporting allows us to mitigate risks, re-allocate resources, identify investment opportunities, and ensure our efforts are aligned to the organization’s purpose and goals. Even more, it gets critical information to senior leaders so they can weigh in on key decisions and help us get the necessary resources to be successful.
When I worked in Finance, we published a simple dashboard (i.e. one page, high-level summary) monthly to highlight our actual performance, make predictions about the future, and identify key actions to remedy issues. In a quick glance, our leaders received valuable information to take action where needed and Finance was able to get the information and resources it required for success in an effective manner. When I came to HR, I noticed that we did not have similar reporting and it often led to delays in getting what we needed from senior leaders to execute on our goals. So I decided to create a similar dashboard to get information in front of our senior leaders on a regular basis. After several attempts, I discovered a way to create a compelling HR dashboard to summarize our progress towards goals.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression
Too often, we create dashboards that contain every type of metric you can imagine. While all of these metrics are interesting, there are too many of them for a senior leader to consume quickly and act upon. Don’t get me wrong—these metrics are important and necessary for individual department managers to optimize their functions. But, they often lack business context, which makes it hard for a senior leader to know what to do with them. Over time, I have found that leaders become immediately invested in a dashboard when you connect it to something meaningful to them.
So, the first step to making an effective dashboard is to start with indicators that will capture the leaders’ attention. In my previous blog post, “3 tips for impactful hr goals,” one of my tips is to be accountable. In other words, use the same metrics to measure your performance against goals that the organization is using to measure its performance. These organization metrics are the foundation of your dashboard. Think about it—wouldn’t a leader be drawn in immediately if the first few indicators were the same ones to which she was being held accountable? This is a great way to engage leaders immediately on your dashboard as it connects what you are doing to the larger organizational goals.
Speedy Gonzales
Now that you have the foundation of your dashboard, it is time to report on how quickly you are making progress. I refer to these measures as efficiency indicators. So, for example, if your goal is to create a presence in the South African market and hire 100 people externally, you may select an efficiency indicator, such as time-to-productivity (or the average number of days it takes to hire and get resources productive). If you are mobilizing internal people to move from your U.S.-based office to South Africa, you may have an efficiency indicator like time-to-mobilize (or the average number of days it takes to identify and move someone from the U.S. location to South Africa). Depending on your execution plan, you can identify 3 efficiency indicators to illustrate your progress. These efficiency indicators will help identify risks early on with meeting your overall goals or process delays that may require remediation. They may also highlight a resourcing issue to senior leaders that could lead to additional investment to help achieve your goals.
Haste makes waste
You know as well as I do that efficiency indicators tell half the story. It is not all about how fast you move—you also need to ensure the results are high quality. That’s why I like to balance efficiency with effectiveness measures. For every efficiency metric you identify, I suggest you use a corresponding effectiveness metric to balance speed and quality. This will ensure you are making genuine progress toward your goals. Let’s use the same South African market example. If you are using time-to-fill to measure the days it takes to make external hires, you may select an effectiveness indicator like short-tenure turnover, or the number of people who are quitting within their first 90 days. If you are using time-to-mobilize to measure how long it takes to mobilize resources from the U.S. location to South Africa, you may use an indicator that measures the resources’ performance in the first 60-90 days to ensure they are adapting well to the new environment. Again, effectiveness metrics will help you identify risks or process issues early on that could impact the quality of your results.
Parting gifts
Now that you have relevant content, you need to figure out how to present the information. I can’t tell you how many times great work gets tossed aside because it has not been communicated properly. I recommend you really take the time to think about how you present your dashboard. You may only have five seconds to get the leader’s attention and another thirty seconds once you capture it. Make sure you keep the dashboard to one simple page where the leader can consume the key details quickly and know what you need from them. There should be no more than three metrics per section. If you want some more tips, you can check out my blog post “4 principles for designing hr solutions.”
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