Human Capital Analytics: How to Harness the Potential of Your Organization's Greatest Asset

Appendix A

Different Levels to Describe Measurement

The more you know about how the pieces of a project can be classified or viewed from different angles, the easier it is to be creative with finding new metrics, new demographic descriptors, and more innovative ways of viewing your company’s business processes. You can be more confident that you have considered your options and chosen the best set for a given project. In this appendix, we will show you the basic math building blocks and also delve into several different scales that are widely used within learning and development: Kirkpatrick/Phillips, Bersin, and Spitzer. We will also cover the Six Boxes Model, which is about performance improvement but is so useful that we feel compelled to include it.

Let’s start at the beginning, with mathematics. Math has a basic set of descriptors about how to measure things. It divides variables into four types:

1. Nominal variables are those that separate data into categories but do not have a numerical value associated with them. Variables you might come across in human capital are the demographic descriptors, such as region, gender, or race. Nominal is sometimes called categorical.

2. Ordinal variables are those measured with a number that indicates placement relative to other items, but the placement does not specify some exact quantity. For example, if I finish fourth in a race, I am not half as fast as the number-two finisher or twice as fast as the number-eight finisher. “Fourth” ...