Chapter 6. The Employee Lifecycle—A Metrics Roadmap from the C-Level

In a 2006 HRMetrics.org survey of C-level executives, managers were asked to identify, in ranked order, the most important metrics to them within performance and HR. What’s not surprising in the result of the survey looks different than the dashboard report that many HR teams probably present to executives. What was surprising was not that HR and other C-level executives were misaligned in what kind of data they thought was important, or that HR had no clear set of value propositions for executives to review. It was that executives and HR intuitively understood those measures that were important to them, and while other metrics might not be important to them, they are important to some other part of the organization.

The metrics that executives favored over others are likely the ones that ideally would be on an executive HR dashboard. Does your HR dashboard have different metrics than what the C-level wants to see? Some of their wishes are difficult to measure (or at least, the cost of measuring it is greater than the benefit of having it), and some may not have an established metric at all to it. Sometimes, however, it is measurable, and we just don’t know how to use the data.