Discussion: View Thread

Hello --

I've been asked by my Agency to select the top five or six performance
indicators for our HR department and submit a report. This will later be
rewritten and placed in the Annual Report. Does anyone have any
ideas/suggestions on how to proceed? Naturally, my boss wants the work
yesterday. Thanks very much.

Joanne McLachlan
AISP Ltd.

Joanne,

There are some fairly well accepted performance indicators for Human Resource
Management activities. The first step, however, should be to determine what
is important to your agency. Often these are chosen based upon criticality
to operations; problem prone areas; and/or volume. This will allow you to
select those 5 or 6 indicators that best integrate your function with the
core business strategy of the agency.

Include measures that demonstrate both effectiveness and efficiency. As an
example training outcomes and training as a percent of payroll or for
recruitment employee survival curves and cost per new hire. You may also
want to include measures of your performance in relationship to other
organzations leading you to benchmark with other HR operations. A good
source for such information is the Saratoga Institute.

I hope you find this helpful. If you have any other questions, fell free to
contact me privately.

Dave

Mclachlans wrote:

> Hello --
>
> I've been asked by my Agency to select the top five or six performance
> indicators for our HR department and submit a report. This will later be
> rewritten and placed in the Annual Report. Does anyone have any
> ideas/suggestions on how to proceed? Naturally, my boss wants the work
> yesterday. Thanks very much.
>
> Joanne McLachlan
> AISP Ltd.

--
Moon Consulting Group
Phone: 330/656-4393
Fax: 330/528-0135
E-mail: dlmoon@ix.netcom.com

Sitting here thinking about Joanne McLachlan's request for information (see
below) I despair!

With respect, (because I've been faced with the same problem and responded
accordingly) the very idea of taking performance indicators from one
situation and applying them to another leaves me with the concern that all
that is important here is `window dressing' - the idea that producing a
report which satisfies the need to produce a report is more important than
improving performance.

My belief is that solid research within the organisation is needed - not
someone else's idea of what represents a performance indicator being fed
into the system.

This probably doesn't help much because there is obviously need to survive
within a dysfunctional system and I understand that. However, I believe
that to hold on to the idea that the most valid solutions are solutions
which are found within your organisation - not those found elsewhere, is
important.

And if the boss wants it yesterday then perhaps he will soon be one of
yesterday's men.

John


Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 08:15:41 -0500
From: Mclachlans <spheres@NETCOM.CA>
Subject: Performance Indicators
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hello --

I've been asked by my Agency to select the top five or six performance
indicators for our HR department and submit a report. This will later be
rewritten and placed in the Annual Report. Does anyone have any
ideas/suggestions on how to proceed? Naturally, my boss wants the work
yesterday. Thanks very much.

Joanne McLachlan
AISP Ltd.

-------------------
John Mayes
<john@EnquireWithin.co.nz>
<http://www.EnquireWithin.co.nz>

Further to my previous reply re Joanne McLachlan's request for performance
indicators, I referred the request to Dr Valerie Stewart who replies as
follows:-

`1. Process quality.
2. Output quality.
3. Outcome quality.
4. Customer satisfaction.
5. Human Capital Growth.
6. Organisational buy-in to what the HR Department does.

Of course, if you impose any or all of the first five without paying close
attention to the sixth, the whole performance will be meaningless. The
point about performance indicators is that they've got to mean something to
the people concerned - somewhere on a continuum from threat to inspiration.
Borrow from another organisation and you get (i) an unknown degree of
mismatch, and (ii) successfully creating the impression that you'd rather
measure things than understand them.

Valerie Stewart'

I hope that this helps.

John
------------------
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 08:15:41 -0500
From: Mclachlans <spheres@NETCOM.CA>
Subject: Performance Indicators

Hello --

I've been asked by my Agency to select the top five or six performance
indicators for our HR department and submit a report. This will later be
rewritten and placed in the Annual Report. Does anyone have any
ideas/suggestions on how to proceed? Naturally, my boss wants the work
yesterday. Thanks very much.

Joanne McLachlan
AISP Ltd.


-------------------
John Mayes
<john@EnquireWithin.co.nz>
<http://www.EnquireWithin.co.nz>

> I've been asked by my Agency to select the top five or six performance
> indicators for our HR department and submit a report. This will later be
> rewritten and placed in the Annual Report. Does anyone have any
> ideas/suggestions on how to proceed? Naturally, my boss wants the work
> yesterday. Thanks very much. Joanne McLachlan AISP Ltd.

Done properly, the indicators should depend on your strategy, goals, and
environmental context. Some indicators may be very specific to your
organization and others may be comparable among similar organizations and
Agencies. If you seek some comparability, search other Agencies' websites,
handbooks, etc. for comparable measures that make sense. At the same time,
think about what the Agency is trying to accomplish (goals, strategy) and how
HR supports the outcomes. Then it is pretty easy to create a few specific
indicators.

If doing an Internet search, the phrase "outcome measures" may be very helpful.

I give my students an assignment that includes indicators used by private and
government health care providers, corporate purchasers, individuals, and family
members. That is 5 different groups and 5 different sets of indicators
centered on the same service. Students think that individuals and family
members ought to have the same measures, but that is not always so. For
example, mental health recipients rate self-esteem as their most important
outcome measure, while clinicians and family members regard the elimination of
symptoms as the most important goal.

- John Naman

Mclachlans wrote:

> Hello --
>
> I've been asked by my Agency to select the top five or six performance
>
> indicators for our HR department and submit a report. This will later
> be
> rewritten and placed in the Annual Report. Does anyone have any
> ideas/suggestions on how to proceed? Naturally, my boss wants the
> work
> yesterday. Thanks very much.
>
> Joanne McLachlan
> AISP Ltd.

Performance for what? Answer this, then decide what the key factors the
influence the outcome. Measure those key factors.

An SPC chart measures (when properly done) deviations from desired
performance early on, and maybe improvements in same. If I want
continuous improvement, I watch for trends in the intermediate
performance lines, backed up by final product data.

Maybe if you knew the number of corrected entry errors per thousand
entries, you could estimate changes in a bank's operating costs. I know
one that did.

But you gotta answer that first question, and the second, for yourself,
first. And at the risk of hyping, my web site discusses a procedure for
doing just that.

Good luck.

Jay
--
Jay Warner
Principal Scientist
Warner Consulting, Inc.
4444 North Green Bay Road
Racine, WI 53404-1216
USA

Ph: (414) 634-9100
FAX: (414) 681-1133
email: quality@a2q.com
web: http://www.a2q.com

Power to the data!

Jac Fitz-enz (1995 - 2nd Ed.) has an excellent book: How to Measure HR
Management, New York: McGraw-Hill. He discusses various indicators - time
to fill, internal hire rate, hire ratios, etc., for the recruiting effort.
However, you'd have to collect and evaluate your historical data to
compute these indicators - it might be time consuming. Also without a
baseline, the indicators may not have much value (unless you use your calculations
as a baseline), in which case, you don't know if your indicators
demonstrate good or poor performance.

Also, it depends on the aspects of HR which are included in your
department - training, management development, etc.? Fitz-enz has measurements for
each aspect of HR.

I think it might be a good idea to do some benchmarking with other
organizations in your type of industry.

Pearl Hilliard
HR Manager
DPS, USC
>philliard@dpsm.usc.edu<


Mclachlans wrote:
>Hello --
>
>I've been asked by my Agency to select the top five or six performance
>indicators for our HR department and submit a report. This will later
be
>rewritten and placed in the Annual Report. Does anyone have any
>ideas/suggestions on how to proceed? Naturally, my boss wants the work
>yesterday. Thanks very much.
>
>Joanne McLachlan
>AISP Ltd.

Pearl Hilliard wrote:

> Jac Fitz-enz (1995 - 2nd Ed.) has an excellent book: How to Measure HR
>
> Management, New York: McGraw-Hill. He discusses various indicators -
> time
> to fill, internal hire rate, hire ratios, etc., for the recruiting
> effort.
> However, you'd have to collect and evaluate your historical data to
> compute these indicators - it might be time consuming.

And what will you consume, if you don't do this kind of spade work?
Assuming that you defined your objectives, which seems to be a common
point in this thread, should you not measure them as best you can, and
watch for trends? "Trends" means, over time.

> Also without a
> baseline, the indicators may not have much value (unless you use your
> calculations
> as a baseline), in which case, you don't know if your indicators
> demonstrate good or poor performance.

He say, "good idea." (from the movie, Never Cry Wolf.)

> Also, it depends on the aspects of HR which are included in your
> department - training, management development, etc.? Fitz-enz has
> measurements for
> each aspect of HR.
>
> I think it might be a good idea to do some benchmarking with other
> organizations in your type of industry.
>
> Pearl Hilliard
> HR Manager
> DPS, USC

[snip]
--
Jay Warner
Principal Scientist
Warner Consulting, Inc.
4444 North Green Bay Road
Racine, WI 53404-1216
USA

Ph: (414) 634-9100
FAX: (414) 681-1133
email: quality@a2q.com
web: http://www.a2q.com

Power to the data!

With regard to the idea of 'HR Management' performance indicators, as
Jay points out (see below) monitoring data over time is a reliable
way of spotting changes in any process.

The problem is interpreting what is actually being indicated by
the data. Pearl mentions (also below) some Fitz-enz based indicators
(I have not read this book) including, for example, time-to-fill,
hire ratios and hire rates. These statistics may indicate how 'good'
the company is to work for and/or how 'likely' they are to 'keep'
staff, rather than providing a performance measure of the HR
Management effort itself.

A change in these indicators may also result from outside causes such
as an economic downturn or a local competitor going bust, rather than
resulting from a change in the company as a whole, or in HR
Management in particular.

Time-to-fill is clearly affected by issues such as: the availablily
of staff, the package being offered, company reputation, local
conditions and changes in legistation. These will all change over
time. When Siemens set up their Microchip facility here in
the North East of England, time-to-fill for engineering posts in
other local companies went through the roof.

Regards

> Pearl Hilliard wrote:
>
> > Jac Fitz-enz (1995 - 2nd Ed.) has an excellent book: How to Measure HR
> >
> > Management, New York: McGraw-Hill. He discusses various indicators -
> > time
> > to fill, internal hire rate, hire ratios, etc., for the recruiting
> > effort.
> > However, you'd have to collect and evaluate your historical data to
> > compute these indicators - it might be time consuming.

To which Jay Warner replied:

> And what will you consume, if you don't do this kind of spade work?
> Assuming that you defined your objectives, which seems to be a common
> point in this thread, should you not measure them as best you can, and
> watch for trends? "Trends" means, over time.
Dave Stewardson
ISRU {Industrial Statistics Research Unit}
MMME {Department of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering}
Stephenson Building
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Tyne & Wear
England
GB - NE1 7RU
TEL 00 44 191 222 8513
FAX 00 44 191 222 8600