This year will be crucial for UK businesses. After enduring the economy’s worst reduction in three centuries, companies can look forward to a bullish year. Monitoring HR metrics during this time will be extremely important, as these will help you identify what the company is doing well and what it needs to improve upon. Doing so will also give you insight into the impact of the pandemic on your business and workforce, so you can adjust where necessary.
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While all HR metrics are vital, the 4 below will be particularly crucial. Take a look:
1. Cost Per Hire
Cost per hire is the total cost of bringing a new hire into the company, and it covers everything from salary to recruitment expenses. Depending on your industry, you can expect to spend anywhere from £2,577 (for retail businesses) to £6,707 (for legal firms) for recruitment alone.
By tracking this metric, you can determine if your cost per hire is too high. You can then make changes to the hiring process to optimise it and reduce costs. You can also avoid outpacing your talent acquisition budget, which is critical because recruiters are predicting high turnover across industries as a consequence of the pandemic.
So, expect to fill in more job vacancies than usual, which is why you need to keep the cost per hire low. Better yet, keep turnover to a minimum by improving working conditions, offering better benefits, and fostering trust and transparency.
2. Engagement
Engagement refers to the employees’ commitment to give their best effort. It is measured using employee engagement surveys, and is a good predictor of employee performance. Put simply, engaged employees are more likely to perform well.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep employees engaged, especially those in work-from-home arrangements. A Gallup survey found that 83% of employees in remote work arrangements admit to being either disengaged or ambivalent about their job or company. This trend will continue this year, with more employees demanding remote work.
That considered, employees working from home have a bigger role to play when it comes to scheduling their own breaks to avoid burnout, setting boundaries, tuning out distractions, and communicating — clear signs of engagement. But it is also up to organisations to drive employee engagement with initiatives like virtual team games and opportunities for casual ‘water cooler’ conversation. Then, by tracking employee engagement closely, you’ll find out whether or not these measures are working and how you can improve.
You can also measure this metric using Guider Mentoring Software.
3. Productivity
Productivity refers to how well an employee performs vis-à-vis performance standards. For instance, employees expected to close 10 accounts in a week are productive if they close 7 or more; otherwise, they might need retraining.
This year, productivity tracking is more important in light of the Decision Maker Panel’s (DMP) estimates that total factor productivity among UK workers will decline by around 1%. More worrisome is the DMP’s forecast of ‘a large reduction in productivity within firms’ as company higher-ups focus on containing the impact of the pandemic. Monitoring employee productivity will help you nip the problem in the bud.
You can implement performance improvement initiatives once you notice dips in productivity. You can initiate employee wellbeing enhancements to ensure that every employee is physically and mentally able to perform optimally. You can even turn to mentoring programs, which have been proven to increase employee productivity, and can be customised depending on your needs. However, you can only be proactive if you have productivity metrics to assess in the first place – so get tracking!
4. Absence Rate
Absence rate pertains to the ratio of absences to workdays during a period, and shows the percentage of days an employee missed during the period covered. It can be calculated using this formula: (number of absences x number of workdays) x 100.
Absences though, are normal – especially with employees still figuring out how to best deal with this health crisis. So, focus on patterns of frequent, unscheduled, and unexcused absenteeism, as these adversely affect both the employee’s productivity and the company’s operations.
Once you spot these patterns, you can talk to the employees concerned to find the root cause of the problem, which can be anything from low morale, to burnout, to failing health. By identifying the cause of the problem, you can then think of solutions to help said employees avoid frequent absences.
Article exclusively written for guider-ai.com
Guest authored by Remi Jordyn