HR Metrics Are Meaningless

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I came across another article this week on HR metrics. Based on the title, "Which HR Metrics Will Matter in 2019?", I thought, "Great!" But once again, I was severely disappointed.

But first, what is a metric? If you look it up in the dictionary, it will tell you it relates to the metric system of measurement. However, as used in business, a metric translates data into some chart or graph that helps with decisionmaking. What were the Big 3 metrics cited in the article? Labor turnover (voluntary resignations), Absence rate, and Number of employees per HR staff member. ARRGGH!! The other measures mentioned in the article as useful are also not where we should be focusing our attention (although there are some good reasons to look at them on occasion.)

Most of the metrics I see in HR departments are busyness metrics--how much of something was done. Other metrics are efficiency metrics--how fast or how cheaply is a process done. I am not saying there is not some value in those, but the value is limited, and truly, the only people who should care are the people in HR. We should be concerned with reducing workload and being efficient with our resources. But from a company leadership viewpoint, I want to know impact. If the results aren't there, then I don't care how efficient the process is. If the results aren't there, I don't care how busy you are.

The problem with HR metrics is that it is very difficult to measure the impact of HR processes and generally, HR policies and practices do not operate in a vacuum, so it is tricky to try to isolate the impact of specific HR programs.

Fundamentally, HR is there to help the workforce be more productive and to leverage the talents of the people in the organization to help the organization achieve its objectives. Wouldn't you agree?

I can see a reason to track turnover. But the value in turnover is not the overall number. Personally, I like to see both voluntary and involuntary turnover. Voluntary turnover can indicate cultural, management, and compensation issues. But more importantly, who is leaving? Critical skill turnover is more important to me than turnover as a whole. When are people leaving? If shortly after hire, we need to look at our hiring and onboarding processes. Is there some other timeframe that seems to have a higher percentage of people leaving? Why? Involuntary turnover in good economic times can indicate poor hiring practices.

But I don't really care about the other two measures cited in the article. What might I look at instead? Every organization is different so I would expect the measures to be different. However, two that should be considered are Revenue Per Employee (this varies hugely by industry) and Employee Engagement. I look at revenue versus profit because although employees have a big impact on the revenue brought into the company, management determines how much of that revenue turns into profit. I would track employee engagement because study after study has shown higher engagement means higher returns.

There are other possibilities, but they should be based upon each business's unique niche and business objectives.

Why Do We Have to Make Things Hard?

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It seems HR, like many professions, has to make relatively straightforward concepts as difficult as possible to prove we're professionals.

In my mind, it's our job to make things as simple as possible. People are complicated enough without us HR pros making things worse.

I'm not talking about all of the compliance things that our lawmakers and regulators have worked hard to make as convoluted and nit-picky as possible, I'm talking about the people part. The true important piece we are responsible for.

What got me going today is the whole generations discussion. I really think this is one of those areas that got blown out of proportion to justify some HR professor's research budget and the income of many, many consultants. (Okay, that was a little sarcastic...)

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I am not saying people who grew up in different times with different political, social, and economic realities don't think differently. They do. Just as people who are the same age in the same community think differently, depending upon their circumstances (race, religion, culture, socioeconomic status, etc.). Over time, most get pushed into the same workplace mold the rest of us got stuffed into. If there is one thing I would like to change about the workplace, that would be it. We do not need a worker cookie cutter, making sure we are all as nearly as possible like the person next to us. In fact, that is a very bad thing.

I am from the "sex, drugs, rock and roll!" generation. Can you even recognize a hippie in the stick-in-the-mud self-righteous people we see around us in the workplace talking about the lack of work ethic in our young people today? Seems I recall hearing those same words from my parents back in the day.

Does that mean I haven't done training on generational differences in the workplace? No, because I have. And I think there is some value in it, just as I think there is value in bringing all types of differences to the attention of our workers and managers, whether that difference, is sex, race, religion, disability, gender orientation, or any other difference between people. I hope there is a greater appreciation and understanding of one another as a result so we can work together more effectively.

But at the end of the day, we are all people. We all want respect. We all want to feel valued. We need to be listened to. We want to know what our bosses expect of us. We want to know how they'll evaluate our performance. We want to learn. We want to feel like the work we did for the last 8 hours was important. That's the bottom line. One size does not fit all, even with those of us who are most alike.

We're different. Good. There's nothing wrong with wanting something different than the person next to you. Celebrate those differences and the value those differences bring to the workplace in terms of creativity, innovation, and yes, fun. But let's not spend our time making those differences a cause for creating another us vs. them division. Let's get rid of the cookie cutters. After all, we're not gingerbread men.

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Mediocrity vs. High Performance

I came across the title of an article today that was contrary to what I seem to teach in my leadership courses, 'Collaboration' Creates Mediocrity, Not Excellence, Says Science. So of course, I had to read it.

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As it turns out, the article isn't disagreeing with what I am telling people, but it focuses on the negative aspects of team collaboration instead of providing a solution.

The average team isn't very effective. According to Dr. Eunice Parisi-Cerew, 60% of teams fail to accomplish their objectives. If Johnny brought home a report card with this sort of grade, we would be very unhappy, and we'd be sitting on him until results improved. In the workplace, we tend to tolerate mediocrity. That's what I see as the most important underlying theme of the article, and it is barely mentioned at all.

We do tend to allow people to get by in the workplace. If they are doing satisfactory work, we allow it. Instead of merely looking for the trappings of team collaboration, we should be shooting for high performance results. Yes, in many of the average teams, high performers tend to carry others. Eventually, the person doing the carrying is going to get mad and go somewhere else--and the effort collapses.

Collaboration is merely working together to produce or create something--there is nothing in the definition that indicates the quality or value of what is created. When we focus merely on collaboration, we are focusing on form over substance. Instead of collaboration being the end result, collaboration should be a tool to achieve the result.

High performance teams are different. They focus on results--not just mediocre results, but outstanding results. They hold one another accountable. They are not afraid to communicate expectations and to push one another.

I am not a believer in having all A players on a team. They bring their own problems. But I am a big believer in developing balanced teams of high potential players--may be they're B's now, but they are willing to work hard and work together toward outstanding results. I have seen a group of B players achieve better results than one with multiple A players because they were focused on a team win, not a personal best.

Creating and nurturing high performance teams is hard work. It isn't luck. And it begins with a focus on high performance standards, not merely collaboration.

Don't Ask The Question If You Don't Want to Deal With the Answer

I'm a consultant. Business owners come to me for advice. They don't always like the answer I give them. But it's their company--they don't have to use that advice. And that's OK. I reserve the right to do the same in my own company.

This happens to me when doing audits as well. When a company asks me to do any type of an audit, I always ask, are you sure you want to know? Because if you know something is not right, you have an obligation to fix it. If you are going to ignore what you find, then don't audit. You can at least plead ignorance. But once you know, it's hard to convince a government agency you were operating in good faith.

I was meeting with a group of people today to discuss employee engagement surveys. One of the people asked, "So, what if a company does the survey, and they fail?" Well, first, taking a survey and getting a poor result is not failure....if you use the information you get to make improvements. Companies only fail if they ignore the answers they get.

It's the same with employee satisfaction or engagement surveys. If you ask employees for their feedback, you can't ignore it. If you do, the employees figure you were just pretending to care what they think and the result is a further decrease in satisfaction and/or engagement. When you take these surveys, there are going to be negative responses. It's a given. No one and no company is perfect. However, you do need to go back to the employees and say, "Okay, here's what you liked and what you didn't. These are the specific issues we are going to tackle in the near term because they seemed to be the biggest concerns." Then get them involved in fixing the problems and keep them apprised of what is happening. Just the knowledge that the company listened and is trying to improve has a significant positive impact on employee motivation.

It's a waste of your time and your employees' time to ask them to complete a survey and then ignore what they tell you. If you don't want to know and don't want to take action, just don't ask in the first place.

The purpose of an audit or an employee survey is to make your company better. Properly used, these tools can not only improve compliance and engagement, but they can help you get better results in terms of profit--a win/win in my book.

Winning the War for Profit

Warning! This post contains shameless self-promotion, as well as a modicum of useful information.

In an earlier post, I talked about leadership training as often pursued by companies, versus leadership training that actually works.

I recently released a short eBook (paperback to follow in a few months), Winning the War for Profit: Developing Leaders Where It Really Matters, that contains a roadmap to leadership development at the first-line supervisor level, as that is the place where (in my opinion) it can do an organization the most good.

Here's a short excerpt from the book that highlights why I think this is such an important topic:

"Here are just a few other reasons to focus on your supervisors:

• The right managers contribute 48% more profit than average managers (Frontline Managers, 2014)
• Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. (Beck, 2014)
• Businesses say that manager and supervisor involvement was "extremely important" or "very important" to the success of their change efforts (Manager/Supervisor's Role in Change Management, 2016)
• Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) over a 3-year period is 286% higher for those companies with a high level of employee trust versus those with a low level of trust, according to Watson Wyatt.
• Ninety-one percent of employees rated their relationship with their immediate supervisor as "very important" or "important" to their job satisfaction. (SHRM, 2016)

"If you are still stuck on the first bullet, you should be. That statement, by itself, should justify every penny of investment you make in your supervisors." 

Winning the War for Profit shows businesses how to select, train and support first-line supervisors. The information is transferable to leadership development at all levels of the organization, but there are some unique aspects to that first leadership rung, so I wanted to focus on that.

The next book, Leadership in the Trenches: Developing Your First-line Leadership Ability, will be focused on the specific skills required by first-line leaders and will be useful for organizations to use in their training programs or for first line supervisors to use independently. Look for that book around 1 October.

You can find Winning the War for Profit on Amazon.

Trust and Face-Time

I was speaking at an HR conference last week on the subject of managing change. In that talk, I talked about the importance of trust in getting employees to adopt change.

In the Q&A at the end of the session, one of the attendees asked, "How can one get employees in remote locations without regular interaction with management to trust the management team?" My response? "Facetime."

I know we have gotten into the whole virtual workplace theme. I interact with my clients mostly in a virtual environment. But I have met all of them, in person, usually more than once.

We've probably all heard the sales maxim that people buy from people they trust. In order to trust them, they have to like them, and to like them, they have to know them. The same is very true with employees and trust. If employees don't see management, they cannot develop trust in management, and if they don't trust management, they are unlikely to buy into the change.

This is one of the big reasons first line supervisors are so important--they are the accessible face of management. But let's not get me on that soapbox this morning. The old "Management by Walking Around" rule applies in today's workplace every bit as much as it used to. Perhaps even more, as workers are seeing their management less and less all the time.

Yes, your job is busy. At a point not too long in my past, I took over a work group of about 350 people that were spread out in several buildings. The tendency is to stay in the building where your office is located. I made it a point to visit every workcenter on a regular basis and to talk to every single person there when I went by. And to make sure I did it, I appointed someone to hold me accountable.

The visits weren't long. Initially, the employees were completely thrown off by management in their area. It was obvious that it was not something they were used to and when it happened, it wasn't a good thing. It took several weeks for them to relax and some months before they would actually bring up and discuss problems and make suggestions. They had a chance to ask "why" about policies and procedures from the person who made/approved them. I don't think it is enough just to glad-hand your employees (except maybe the first time.) Be interested; ask questions; recognize good work.

This simple, but regular, action was part of the reason this group gelled so well and actively pursued better ways of doing the work. In the case of the person in my conference session, to visit her group required overnight travel. So you don't see them every week, but you have to make it a point to see them occasionally. In between, yes, other forms of contact help reinforce the relationship.

My point? Get off your butt and walk around. Even if it's a long walk.

Retaining and Propagating Knowledge

Have you noticed it is a never-ending battle to keep yourself proficient? Things are changing every day. You are never done learning. And neither are your employees. No one can be expert in everything you do.

Personally, I hate everything to do with accounting. I don't want to learn it in any detail. I want to know enough to understand the financial statements--I am perfectly happy to leave the details to someone else. I hire someone to do the bookkeeping who will make sure we have the records we need and know where the money comes from, where it's going and what's our current status. It keeps me sane. I use that information to make decisions, but I don't want the time suck of trying to keep up on this myself.

But therein is our dilemma. Not only do people need to stay current in their knowledge, but the organization needs to find a way to use, keep and expand upon that knowledge. People quit for other jobs. Others retire. They take a lot of knowledge with them.

How do we retain knowledge in our organization? How do we spread that knowledge around the organization, so we learn faster and aren't floundering when something happens? I talked about some of the mechanical ways in my last post, Let's Talk Systems. But there are other, more interactive ways to learn and share knowledge quickly.

I'll use myself as an example. I decided to write a book. It comes out in just a few days. (Dancing!) I have been meaning to write the book for a couple of years, but trying to learn all of the steps in getting published on my own just frustrated the heck out of me. I talked to the couple of people who I knew had written a book, but I just couldn't get the steps down in my mind. Finally, I signed up for a class and joined an on-line Facebook group. The class led me step-by-step (mostly) through a process and the on-line group provided a way to get my questions answered and provided encouragement along the way. Voila! Slightly more than 60 days later, I'm a published author.

Other than bragging on my accomplishment, what's the point? My point is organizations only stay on top by constantly learning--which means the people learn. But since people can come and go, we need to be sure to capture their knowledge in some way and share it with others to ensure the entire organization can capitalize on that knowledge. This again points to the need for planning and using a systematic process. At the same time, people engage more with the learning and can learn faster when they interact with others more knowledgeable and those also learning. Shared questions, experiences, and knowledge help to reinforce concepts and enable the learner to apply the knowledge more quickly.  In addition to faster and arguably, better, learning, this type of learning helps keep your experts engaged and helps everyone feel more a part of the team. A real win-win in terms of retention.

I suggest you try to find ways to incorporate social media tools into the learning plans in your organization.