[SOUND] As we continue to explore the various elements of the HR life cycle, let's take some time to discuss the function of employee relations. It is critical for any organization to measure how effective their employer relations practices are. It will allow you to prevent and detect systematic issues within your company. This will lessen the probability of legal actions, ensure high productivity, and help you determine which leaders you might need to develop. As you look to develop a set of metrics to determine the temperature of your overall employee relations, I suggest a five point model to exist. First, are you measuring items to help predict and prevent future issues or are you reactive in your measurements? Do you allow your managers to be part of what is measured? Do you publish, talk, and ensure employees see what you're measuring? Second, do you give frequent poll surveys? This is a great way to check in on your culture and your employees. You do not necessarily need to poll survey everyone each time. However, frequent short surveys with a quick turnaround on results and actions are a helpful way to assess your HR function. Are employee relations issues HR issues, or are they part of your overall culture? Ensuring your managers are well trained on how to handle and coach is critical. Employee relations is not just HR. It takes a village. Every people leader is responsible for maintaining culture formally or informally. It is critical that HR does not become the people police. And that in the way in which your organization expects managers to manage employee needs is clearly trained and communicated. Once employees are surveyed, how do you communicate their results? Is it transparent? Is it a quick turnaround? Do you conduct focus groups and outline actions and results? Do you address concerns? Do you make sure to also address what is going right and how you will continue to evolve those aspects of your culture? This fourth item is very important. How you keep surveys confidential, and how you utilize technology for easier access, so people can take and review data and outcomes is critical. More recent, the focus around mental health in the workplace has become a top priority for HR professionals and companies. When associates are plagued with mental health concerns, either they themselves or family members at home, productivity satisfaction and overall spend on healthcare, just to name a few impact your business. Measures to help determine if your mental health needs in your company can be found by doing employee surveys, examining if employees are utilizing time off. Looking to see if you have an increase in substance abuse health claims or opioid claims are just a few ways to see what your mental health is looking like in your organization. The employee relations function is more than just disciplining, processes and legal requirements. The employee relations function is morphing into measuring the overall employee experience. And one of the most important functions in measuring and impacting the climate and culture of your business. As you review your entire HR organization, it's critical that the metrics and analytics you focus on are metrics that align with the business strategy to drive business results. Our role is to assist in solving business problems, not HR issues. Our goal is to create a department that is less reactive and more proactive driving business outcomes and initiatives. One of the most helpful matrix to measure is the overall revenue earned by an employee. You might ask, why is this important? The fact is, organizations have many people and one of the biggest complaints from those who are the hardest of workers is the feeling they are pulling the bulk of the weight. By measuring revenue earned by person, you can start to determine if one group is outperforming another. It can help you determine if you have any qualities and workload, need additional resources and back office functions. It's a great starting point to evaluate your commissions and your headcount. I also suggest that you measure something called employee effort. As we look to streamline, optimize and build a better experience for our employees, we must take the time to look at our internal HR processes and measure the amount of time employees spend doing non productive work. Assessing if our systems and processes are too cumbersome, manual or unnecessary is an important way to measure experience. None of us like cumbersome shopping experiences. As customers, we like things fast, automated and meaningful. Take a look at your policies and practices your HR tools and systems to make sure they too are offering the same experience to your internal customers who are your associates. As businesses evolve, the way we value our culture and people have evolved too. Over the last decade, the employee experience has been a top of mind metric for many organizations. Understanding how likely your employees are to recommend your company to work for and the frequency in which you recognize your employees, both formally and informally are key to understand. Metrics such as employee referral percentages, knowing the number of relatives who work at your company are both important. People who recommend their workplace, who have friends and family who worked with them are less likely to leave than those who don't. Additionally, understanding how employees want to be recognized and measuring the various types of programs you have offered, correlating those programs to performance and poll survey scores will help you understand your engagement. And are key indicators to predict turnover and departments that might have management end issues or productivity concerns. Lastly, as you build out your HR metric practices, your main goal is to ask, how can we build an HR function and a culture of the future? You want people to come, stay, grow and lead with your organization. We in HR must be able to create workplaces that are a combination of many types of workers, full time, part time, gig workers, computers and bots. We need to embrace technology and create experiences that are both virtual and in person. Our expectations need to evolve from reactive storytelling with data to predict analytics through AI. We are moving to a world where the soft skills and high emotional intelligence will be the key drivers to business success. As we continue to automate, operationalize SQL code, most of our day-to-day common tasks will be done through technology, but we can't automate emotional intelligence. The overall customer experience and focus of the customer satisfaction is evolving. The workplace environment that invests heavily in developing and creating a cultural, physical, emotional, and environmental well being will have a competitive advantage on all others. It's critical that we find ways to invest in measuring these metrics, to ensure that we do create best places to work. Now that we have outlined the various aspects of our HR lifecycle and we have identified metrics that we wish to measure. The question is how do we display and track what we are measuring. There are two categories of traditional HR metric building to help put it all together, dashboards and scorecards. They provide a common method to help understand your benchmarks and your organization's business processes to performance and determine where you are to meeting those goals and objectives. More often than not your HR System has a dashboard or a scorecard built in. These pre-created dashboards and scorecards are usually available to HR and people managers to look at things, such as headcount, turnover, hires and performance. I encourage you to take a look at your internal systems and identify how you can either add to or utilize these dashboards and scorecards to avoid manual work. A scorecard takes key measures and displays and manages an organization's process and progress towards strategic objectives. A scorecard should benchmark where you're trending in correlation to your goals. They typically look at data both internally and externally for comparison. A scorecard will highlight how goals and targets are trending. They have performance indicators, red, yellow, green, to help you visualize how your metrics are measuring to expectations. A dashboard on the other hand is more personalized. It's a snapshot of performance in time. It allows you to make analytical decisions based on the data that you're seeing. Conceptually, a dashboard is a subset of a scorecard. It takes a more detailed level look at the scorecards, high level data and breaks it down. Dashboards are geared towards simplified understanding of your underlying data to make decisions. HR dashboards are important tools for identifying areas of improvement. They're important at all levels within an organization, not just HR. We cannot improve what we don't measure. It's recommended that HR professionals use dashboards and scorecards when measuring their progress and assessing outcomes. What's most important is you find a way to display and monitor what you're measuring. It's critical that you're publishing and discussing your metrics with employees at all levels, not just management. You will build a culture of data and change management by doing this. When a culture creates active participation in what it measures, it creates transparency, that transparency creates results. It has the ability to obtain and keep employees focused on delivering key business, strategic results. And in the end, everybody wins. [SOUND]
