People don’t leave organizations, they leave managers. So it’s key to make sure you’re doing as much as you can in HR to help support, develop, and encourage your leaders. There are data and metrics to help you.
Here are just a few HR metrics to consider.
Span of Control
This metric gives you an understanding of how many people your leaders are managing. The span of control can include direct reports or dotted line reports in a matrix environment. Indirect reports are good to measure as well, especially in companies with a tall hierarchy structure.
For smaller organizations, your org chart will be an easy way to determine the span of control. In a larger organization, calculate the headcount based on the supervisor. It may be more difficult to get a true calculation of indirect reports since that’s not typically stored in an HRIS.
Higher spans of control contribute to lower employee engagement. An overstressed leader with too many direct reports will not be able to properly support their employees’ individual development. There’s no one right number that is applied across the board. It will vary depending on the type of job being supervised and the level of the employee’s skills.
Turnover
A vital metric you should already be tracking is turnover. It tracks the number of people that are leaving over a period of time. You’ll want to look at the turnover rate of not only the leaders but also within the teams they lead. Turnover won’t just cost you financially (potentially up to twice that’s person’s salary), but there are other impacts too.
High turnover rates are an indication of low employee engagement, low morale, and poor leaders. Constant turnover in leadership will make employees uneasy. That negative energy will perpetuate throughout the organization. Also, high turnover in one team is an indication of a poor people manager.
Diversity Breakdown
Diverse representation in leadership attracts and retains talent. Just as diversity helps collaboration and creativity in the lower levels, it’s important in leadership too. Diversity in thought from different backgrounds fosters innovation. It will support and increase inclusion too.
Diversity needs to be supported from the top down. Leadership is integral to ensuring it becomes apart of the org culture. Employees need to believe their leaders truly value diversity and inclusion by seeing them walk the talk.
Performance review scores and KPIs
If your VP of Sales, who manages the team that brings in 15% of the revenue, quits tomorrow, do you know who would replace her? This type of disruption is inevitable and the best organizations plan for it. There’s way too much risk in not having a backup plan for critical roles like this.
Tracking both performance review scores and KPIs are great for succession planning. Keep tabs on your top performers and start creating possible career paths with training and development. Even use this data to identify your middle and low performers. You can determine what the gaps are to get them to where they need to be. Or you may want to consider how to manage them out. There’s nothing more toxic to a workplace than a bad people manager.
An HR dashboard can help you manage your workforce’s data and metrics. It automatically creates visualizations based on the metrics you choose. So you can quickly understand what’s going on with your talent. This tool will let you skip the calculations and go straight to the analytics.
Sign up today for a free demo of our automated HR dashboard.
