The Accelerate HR Blog
End-of-year HR reports (Fri Dec 28 2007)
At one of my clients, the head of HR has taken a two-week vacation. While he's away, he's set his team a task - to prepare all the end-of-year HR reports. This week the team called me in to help them assemble the data.
This is a wonderful opportunity to do something important.
I've seen what they've produced before. It's the normal fare. Number of joiners, number of leavers, incidence of absence and lateness, appraisal scores etc. How does management use the material? I'm guessing, but judging from the data and from the way most businesses think around here, I'd say that it's going to be used mainly to calculate the end-of-year bonus. Cut the bonus if people were absent or late, or if the appraisal score was low, or if they only worked part of the year.
Which will make some people happy, some people sad, and do virtually nothing to improve the business.
My cunning plan is to give the boss a little surprise when he gets back. Oh, he'll get all the data he wants all right - consultants always need to do as they're told. But he's also going to get a set of 10 business-driver reports. (10 is entirely arbitrary, but seems to be about right: I don't want to flood him with data.)
So which 10 reports? I don't know yet. First I want to brainstorm with the team. And this promises to be an interesting session. I'll be asking them how they think HR contributes to the business, and why. There are some assumptions to be challenged here. For example, they've done a great job of recording all the training events. But has training actually made a difference to performance? If so, how is it measured? What's the return on investment in training? Or is it just enough to say that training's 'a good thing' - so the more, the better?
I've also posted a question at LinkedIn. 'What end-of-year reports can HR give management that will make a real contribution to the business's performance next year?' Already the responses have been pretty interesting. Here are a few highlights:
* Re-fills (positions filled more than once because the first person didn't work out)
* Internal hires/promotions/intercompany transfers (i.e. Do you really promote from within?)
* ... the strength of your branding and reputation as an employer to attract and retain talent ...
* Employee Return on Investment
* Cost of vacancies / recruitment
And in one response, a warning:
I have the funny feeling that particularly in HR quite a few people consider a job done with a report sent .... no report will add anything to your performance, if not acted upon.
If we can answer questions like these, and make sure they do lead to a course of action, then HR starts becoming a business-critical activity - a valuable profit-center rather than a tolerated cost-center.
In the next week or two, I'll be telling you how we got on, and which 10 reports we generated. But in the meantime, if you'd like to contribute your own ideas here, I'd love to hear them.
