So you read Data Importance PT 1 and stood up a couple servers, built a couple databases, and created some stored procedures and now you have all this data that has started accumulating all since last month….GREAT! Now the question is what do you do with it all?? Again this article might be elementary to some, but we’ve got to start somewhere. The best place to start is taking a step back and mapping out where your organization is and definitely the HR department is on the analytics maturity model. I’m sure some of you have seen this graphic before if you are in an analytics function. This series is written from the assumption of the organization starting from absolute scratch.
Starting in the descriptive analytics area as an HR department shouldn’t be a daunting task once you have followed part one or atleast have the data available. First you will need something OTHER than excel to use. There are some free data visualization softwares available such as PowerBi or if you have something else available to you that is great, this is the starting point. Once you have a data source (the database you stood up from PT 1) for HR data and a visualization tool chosen it’s time to start building. For HR the best and most impactful place to start is headcount and some simple metrics around headcount. This would include metrics around hires, terminations, and rates. I included a quick example of a beautiful HR dashboard that would make a large impact at an organization that didn’t have any reporting before.
Some of these metrics may seem very easy such as headcount (DistinctCount(EmployeeID), but you need to be aligned with the business as your organization may have a specific definition of what to count as an employee. Next is defining the hires and termination definitions to implement. For terminations having solid definitions of voluntary, involuntary, and retirements for accurate tracking. Then defining the turnover ratio or rate to use and how it will be calculated. There are many options to use for this metric such as a monthly calculation or a rolling 12 month termination rate. With these metrics defined, calculated, and implemented on a dashboard will give leadership quick insight to the human capital portion of the business and be able to make decisions around it. This dashboard shows the major metrics of Headcount, Hires, Terminations, Turnover Ratio, Transfers, Headcount by Function, and all filterable by department and year in a clean, very readable format. It also has some bonus metrics like average age, headcount by gender, and salary by gender. While these metrics are beneficial, keep in mind who will have access to your report as it might create a data privacy issue. Some other metrics that you may add depending on the data available could be exit survey reasons, net movement by month, breaking down the tenure into bands, rolling termination rates, and Building a dashboard like this for a company without reporting like this will make your HR department look amazing. Once you have all your reporting built, curated, automated, and training done its to to move to the next step of the analytics maturity model of diagnostic analytics which we will cover in PT 3.