Happy employees make for a happy company which results in even happier customers. Understanding your employees and knowing what makes them tick is crucial for the success of any business. Traditionally, companies have been using very laborious annual or bi-annual performance reviews and the resulting HR metrics to handle this. Is it really enough?
HR metrics are an incredibly important tool. They help you to make the right decisions in talent acquisition, employee recognition and employee engagement among other things. There are definitely some benefits to organizing a questionnaire once a year as it can give insight into deep and wide issues in the organization. That being said, collecting more regular feedback from your employees provides a consistent insight into what’s happening with the most important asset of the business: your staff.
What kind of HR metrics should you be tracking then? Naturally, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of metrics to choose from. There are some HR metrics though that are good at showing how happy and engaged employees are. Labour turnover is a big indicator on the work conditions as well as absence rates. When employees are often absent from work or you find yourself looking for new replacements on a constant basis, there might be some issues to fix.
Getting to these issues is too costly and too slow with annual surveys that can take months to analyze. The analytical feedback simply comes too late to solveissues picked up by HR metrics a couple of months back. Adding a weekly or a monthly feedback cycle to the annual reviews and HR metrics helps to identify potential pitfalls in advance. They also give the opportunity to react to pitfalls when they happen, not six months afterwards.
Using HR metrics and continuous feedback collection can boost HR’s position inside a company and bring it the appreciation it deserves. In smaller companies, light feedback questionnaires can be a way to create HR into the company and show employees you care about them.
Make sure you get the best from your employees and start collecting better HR metrics with us. :)
