Many Chief Executive Officers (CEO’s) and Chief Financial Officers (CFO’s) complain that their Human Resource professionals do not report metrics about Total Rewards or otherwise that matter to the organization. Instead they report metrics that are very general and not specific enough to be helpful or they are metrics that are important mainly to the HR team and not linked to the organizational capabilities or employee competencies. We want you to be able to provide metrics that are relevant to the organization – metrics that matter to the CEO or CFO and all other leaders in the organization.
After selecting a metric for this discussion, ask yourself what does the metric that I am proposing tell me about the effectiveness of the Total Rewards program (or if relevant, a specific reward)? The metric must relate to the Total Rewards package to be a relevant metric for this discussion and for your next presentation. Revenue, profit, customer satisfaction are good data to know, but they are not relevant metrics for this assignment.
Further, the percentage of turnover is not important, by itself, as a metric, but the metric of the percentage of the highly valued employees who are leaving the organization and why they are leaving is helpful to know since the data should tell us if the rewards currently offered are a factor in those valuable employees decision to resign. Whether employees are happy is not a helpful metric (nothing against having happy employees but the organization would be better informed if it knew whether the employees are engaged in their work because of the total rewards). A metric that reports the percentage of the employees who are satisfied with the organization is not as helpful as knowing by individual segment of employee which benefit is of most value, through a forced ranking of the benefits. Therefore, do not select turnover as a metric on its own, do not select employee satisfaction on its own, and do not select revenue, profit, customer satisfaction, or productivity as a metric.
Discussion #1
Give an academic definition of the term metric (with an in-text citation and full reference). Discuss why, in general, metrics are important for HR professionals to report. For example, they can assist the HR professional in achieving their goals and objectives while also assisting the whole organization. For example if innovation is a core capability of the organization, tracking the level of turnover of the individuals who have had the most success innovating would be important along with knowing why these individuals are leaving. This metric would allow the organization to change incentives or other rewards, if needed, or look for other ways to retain the needed talent. Respond to two peers.