It has always been important to implement KPI for HR. Doing so ensures the productivity of the department and the whole workforce.
The HR department is quite the most misunderstood one in the whole enterprise. Most people hold this department as not as important as the sales or the production departments. In reality, this is the department that is responsible for the effective recruiting and hiring of the members that comprise your very own workforce. Without the HR department, you just might have people whose work experience and skills do not really match their respective positions at hand. Thus, it is a must to implement KPIs or key performance indicators to gauge the performance of the whole department. With KPI for HR implemented, you are sure to have your HR department working out all the kinks in the process quite easily.
So, what exactly do these KPIs do? These actually recognize both the strengths and the weaknesses of the employees on the payroll of your company. All sorts of data that pertain to the work performance of each and every employee are recorded as input for evaluation and are then subjected to the rigors of the metrics implemented at hand. A standardized scoring system is then used to evaluate all of these metrics. The results are then interpreted to show what really happened and when this particular event happened. Metrics, however, do not really show why this particular event happened. All it can interpret are results in the guise of quantifiable figures, not qualitative ones in nature.
Let us use, as an example, a typical scenario amongst technical support representatives of a call center. Let us say Jack is very adept when handling issues that pertain to the modem. Whenever a customer calls and has a problem about his or her modem, Jack is able to resolve the issue in less than 5 minutes flat. However, when it comes to problems about the OS or the operating system already, Jack finds it difficult to resolve the issue. In fact, it takes him far longer than 10 minutes. This particular aspect could not have been identified without the use of metrics. After all, there are so many technical support issues brought up by Jack’s callers all throughout his shift in day, how much more in a single work week! But because of HR KPIs, the problem has been weeded out and the proper course of action can then be determined.
Another metric that the HR department should look into pertains to the overall disposition of the employee to his job. This category can be divided into subcategories, which include teamwork, cooperation, leadership skills, and more. By using metrics, the HR department can now pinpoint the factors that hamper productivity, and the proper courses of action can then be implemented as well.
There are so many KPI for HR that you can use. A word of caution though, for it is better to use a few relevant KPIs than many irrelevant ones. Make sure to choose only the ones that are relevant to your company’s goals and objectives. Some of the commonly used HR KPIs include human investment ration, turnover rate. Training costs, absence rate, training hours per employee, average remuneration, and acceptance rate.
