Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

Managing Through Metrics

Metrics have the ability to change the business processes of an entire company overnight. Companies that have embraced any quality program (Six Sigma, etc.) can attest to the power of a good metric. But what makes a quality metric powerful is that it’s directed towards a process. A Six Sigma is meaningless unless it is directed to measure something you suspect needs to be managed or changed. How many metrics have been created because the data is available and you need something for the big executive meeting that looks good on a pie chart?

Building metrics throughout the talent life cycle must have a management goal. It does not need to be an executive goal, but there must be an intended audience, a management or change goal, and a buy-in on that goal by all stakeholders.

An example of using a powerful metric the wrong way: At a recent conference on metrics, an HR manager complained that their hiring manager’s contracted time-to-fill metric, which is an agreed time-to-fill service level between recruiter and hiring manager, hadn’t impacted the time-to-fill of recruiting at all. Probing further we discovered that hiring managers set the date for time-to-fill without any HR agreement. Literally, in this contracted time-to-fill, one of the parties (HR) had no say in setting the measure! There is no possible way a change can occur if the teams working in the process can’t both agree to participate in change management.

When it comes to leveraging change using ...