The social community for HR professionals...

It's a numbers game

I've had a few conversations in the last few days that have really reinforced the importance that numbers have in building HR's credibility and ensuring that we make a valuable contribution to our business. By numbers I'm referring primarily to accurate statistics and meaningful metrics.

Let's face it, business is a numbers game. Our CEO's are living and breathing numbers. Revenue; profit; EBITDA and growth forecasts to name but a few. If we really hope to influence and contribute to our business, then it's pretty obvious that good numbers play an essential role to that strategy.

To be honest though, I don't even think it's enough to just produce good statistics and metrics. As capable HR Practitioners we need to truly understand them, so that we are in a position to have intelligence conversations around them with the business.

In my experience, HR faces two major obstacles before we can get to that point. Firstly, HR metrics seem to be notoriously difficult and time consuming to pin down. Secondly and perhaps this is actually part of the cause of the first obstacle, understanding statistics and metrics tends not to be a typical strong point of your average HR practitioner.

So what we do about these obstacles? Well I think we need to start with some honest conversations, both with ourselves and our team members. We need to work out just what exactly we understand about business numbers such as statistics and metrics.If it turns out that we don't actually know as much as what we ought to, then we need to urgently commit to seeking out ways to bridge the gap to ensure that moving forward we all possess a sufficient understanding.

Hopefully that give us a decent starting point, from which we can then set an expectation for the future. Anyone coming into the HR team within our business must possess a sound understanding of numbers, statistics and metrics. This begins to ensure that we are positioning ourselves to influence and contribute to the business on their level.

To wrap things up I think it's time, as a community to send out a message to our fellow HR practitioners. Not understanding numbers, no longer has place in the future paradigm of Human Resources.

Tags: metrics, numbers, statistics

0 members like this

Next Post >

Add a Comment

You need to be a member of ConnectingHR to add comments!

Join ConnectingHR

Comment by Gareth Jones on November 13, 2011 at 23:24: Good question your last one. And you are forgiven for coming full circle ;)

I think the adoption of social and community habits (by the employee) will force employers to adopt the technologies and more importantly that way of communicating internally. Only a handful are at the moment but in future they wont have a choice - it will be as normal as employee surveys, team meetings etc.

The difference will be that the company wont be able to ignore what is being said and with that, the low engagement levels. They will have to change and become at least, more 'good' (lol) otherwise their lack of engagement will become so public that not only will people not want to work there but also - and this is a prediction - suppliers and customers will start to shun them too.

Interesting stuff. We should continue this conversation over a coffee or beer ;)

Thanks for posting here btw - nice to see it happening.

Comment by Adam Axon on October 18, 2011 at 21:41: "Good is the enemy of great" - I love that quote, couldn't agree more.

You mention that that we never measured quality until pressure from Japanese manufacturers meant we couldn't afford not to. Does that not mean we need two key things to occur to bring engagement to the forefront.

a. Improved coverage of organisations benefiting from high engagement. With the idea that, more coverage helps it becomes the expectation rather than the exception. (In some sense, I think employees already think like this, which is maybe a contributing factor to engagement being so low in traditional companies)

b. Improved metrics around engagement and the benefits it has to the business

Forgive me for thinking that the second point, brings us back full circle to HR needing to better understand business metrics and numbers and how the work we do affects them :P

Serious question though, Do you think that Engagement is something that will go widespread and become common practice, or do you think it will remain exclusively for the "Great" companies out there?

Comment by Gareth Jones on October 18, 2011 at 20:28: Because they can! The point i was making in my latest blog was that 12 years ago they could ignore customers too - until they got a voice, and peer to peer became more powerful than marketing budgets in terms of purchasing influence. We just have not reached that stage with employees yet. The cost of poor engagement is rarely measured. A bit like the cost of quality, or rather the cost of poor quality. We never used to measure that until the Japanese started tearing a hole in our manufacturing base.

So organisations can continue to ignore it because generally they get by. As Jim Collins says in his excellent bood Good to Great - "good is the enemy of great". And he is right. Good hides a multitude of sins. Making a profit masks all manner of things.

Comment by Adam Axon on October 18, 2011 at 19:23: Thanks for the comment Gareth, can I pose a question to you. If engagement is so important (I agree that it is), then why is it that organisations continue to ignore it?

Comment by Gareth Jones on October 18, 2011 at 8:54: Hi Adam Great post - thanks for sharing. I fully get the need to be commercially savvy and understand the numbers and metrics - that goes for every function. HR are not the only ones who have a poor grasp of the business metrics etc. Yet other functions are not as held back. Im with Jon - i dont see getting a better understanding of the metrics/numbers etc as a first trade before we are able to influence the business about better engagement. If you have a dunce as an HR professional thats no excuse for poor engagement.

Unfortunately, organisations are avoiding the issue of engagement, as I pointed out in my latest blog. The Engagement taskforce is an interesting exercise and im keen to keep going with it, but im not convinced that HR not being business literate is the key to unlocking engagement and performance!

Thanks for posting here - great to have you!

Comment by Jon Ingham on September 30, 2011 at 20:13: Look forward to it sometime!

Comment by Adam Axon on September 30, 2011 at 17:47: Thanks for the feedback Jon! I'm intrigued by some of the points your posts raise. I agree wholeheartedly that helping our businesses understand people is a the bigger prize, but still think to have any.chance of doing that we need to be able to understand the business better than what we do now.

This then enables us to communicate our message about the importance of understanding people and the benefits that can bring, in a way that our businesses will actually understand and respect.

Would be very keen to discuss further with you!

Comment by Jon Ingham on September 29, 2011 at 0:08: It's all about people

sin

Adam, I don't disagree with any of this, and yet, I think the fact that business is seen as a numbers game is one of the main reasons many organisations are such uncompelling places, and we struggle so much with employee engagement etc.

Yes, we need to understand the business, but I believe the bigger prize is to get our businesses to understand people.

See:

http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2011/06/my-presentation-with-empl...

http://www.xperthr.co.uk/blogs/employment-intelligence/2011/04/jon-...