systematicHR

Can you make your managers addicted to HR? Can you make them care about processes and policies and procedures? Do they really care about the employee engagement score? Personally, I think we can, but I’m not sure we know how to do it yet.

Three and five years ago, we all saw the demos of the snazzy new talent management tools that showed us these great manager and executive dashboards with these great KPI’s and red lights and green lights. They had things that looked like odometers and sliders and any type of gauge you can imagine to display the health of an organization through a specific set of metrics. Best of all, the vendors were all going to deliver these dashboards out of the box. They would have the data, and would deliver their industry best practices right to your doorstep.

The problem is that we still all seem to think that manager self service, cool portals and cool dashboards are the answers. We think that the KPI’s that everyone else uses is going to be meaningful in our environments. The problem is that those same industry KPI’s don’t actively take into account the nature of our business or the goals that each business unit and manager has. In order to be really impactful, a manager needs to know how a KPI is correlated with their individual goals.

Not all of the standard KPI’s out there are actually meaningful to your organization. If a manager simply does not see the correlation of employee turnover rate to their business goals, they won’t really care. Perhaps it’s putting turnover next to the cost of vacancy, and putting a productivity cost to turnover. Perhaps it’s going even further and correlating their turnover/productivity numbers against the rest of the division or organization to see how they stack up and to put right in front of them what the positive or negative impacts of changing the turnover number would be.

As usual, I don’t claim to have the answers, but I do know that going with the standard “stuff” is not helpful without the manager’s business context. The answer really might be that if you can’t devote an appropriate amount of time figuring this out, perhaps you should not do it at all. I know everyone wants a cool dashboard that their execs can look at. Hey, I even realize that most of you sold your execs on talent management software based on the idea that they would have cool stuff to look at. But in 12 months when they realize that it was only cool for the first month, and they don’t even remember their password to log in, then where are you?