When we talk about the impact of HR activities on our business\u2019s operational production, we don\u2019t usually think that there is a direct correlation.\u00a0 In fact, some of our activities probably do have a relatively high correlation effect on business outcomes that we might be surprised about.\u00a0 In defining correlation, we usually think about it on a \u20131 to +1 scale, with \u20131 being negatively correlated, 0 being no correlation, and 1 being positively correlated.\u00a0 From an HR point of view, if we were able to show that there is a positive correlation from our activities to the business outcomes, that would be a pretty big win.<\/p>\n
Personally, I don\u2019t have any metrics since I don\u2019t work in your organizations with your data.\u00a0 However, with modern business intelligence tools and statistical analysis, it\u2019s certainly possible to discover how our HR activities are impacting business outcomes on a day to day basis.<\/p>\n
Take a couple examples.\u00a0 We know that things like high employee engagement leads to increased productivity, but we don\u2019t always have great metrics around it.\u00a0 Sure, we can go to some industry survey that points to a #% increase for every point that the engagement surveys go up, but that is an industry survey, not our own numbers.\u00a0 Especially in larger organizations, we should be ale to continue this analysis and localize it to our own companies.\u00a0 Similarly, we should be able to link succession planning efforts to actual mobility to actual results.\u00a0 Hopefully we\u2019d be showing that our efforts in promoting executives internally is resulting in better business leadership, but if we showed a negative correlation here, that means that our development activities are lagging the marketplace and we might be better served getting execs from the external market while we redefine our executive development programs.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll take a more concrete example.\u00a0 Lets say we\u2019re trying to measure manager productivity.\u00a0 We might simplify an equation that looks something like this:<\/p>\n
Manager Unit Productivity = High Talent Development Activity \/ (Low Recruiting Activity + Low Administrative Burden)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If this is true, we should be able to show a correlation between the amount of time a manager spends on development activities with her employees to increased productivity over time.\u00a0 Also expressed in the equation, recruiting activity should also be negatively correlated to the manager\u2019s team performance.\u00a0 If the manager is spending less time recruiting, that means she is keeping employees longer, and spending more time developing those employees \u2013 therefore any time spent recruiting is bad for productivity.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying that any of these things are the right measures or the right equations.\u00a0 What I am saying is that we now have the tools to prove our impact on business outcomes, and we should not be wasting these analytical resources on the same old metrics and the newfangled dashboards.\u00a0 Instead, we should be investing in real business intelligence, proving our case and our value, and understanding what we can do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When we talk about the impact of HR activities on our business\u2019s operational production, we don\u2019t usually think that there is a direct correlation.\u00a0 In fact, some of our activities probably do have a relatively high correlation effect on business…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27,40],"tags":[62,221,158,172,69],"class_list":["post-1714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-metrics","category-enterprise-solutions","tag-analytics","tag-business-case","tag-business-intelligence","tag-business-outcomes","tag-data-governance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1720,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions\/1720"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}