As the year draws to a close and we wrap up work, we naturally find ourselves assessing our efforts, our wins, our learnings. And no better way to put it all together than in the form of an annual report. Doing an annual report helps take a step back and get a more strategic view of the year gone, and help us plan for the year ahead.
Here some key HR metrics that will help you assess in what shape your business is from a people point of view:
Turnover rate
The turnover rate looks at all the people that left your business as a result of a resignation. Terminations for other reasons like retrenchment or a hearing are not considered in this metric.
The end goal of looking at your turnover rate is to assess your retention strategy. If you are struggling to retain talent in general, or if there is a position that is particularly difficult to retain, maybe it is time to relook at the specifications of the job descriptions or the name of the role.
Identifying patterns that concern your turnover rate will help you identify ways to overcome such difficulties.
Recruitment efforts
It is important for HR to be able to attract talent organically. This strategy may be better suited to some roles than others, as some positions can be tricky to fill; but a good start is to have all your entry level positions filled through organic searches. This will reduce recruitment expenditure as HR will leverage internal resources for hiring as opposed to external.
When a company recruits mostly entry-level positions, and there are a number of promotions throughout the year, it is evidence that the company has good career-development strategies in place for its employees.
When looking at recruitment, it is also important to look at your recruitment for senior roles; and understand the reasons for filling in such positions with external candidates. If several hires are taking place on managerial level, it is crucial to understand the underlying reasons for high turnover of management. HR should use exit surveys to gain deeper insight into why this is happening.
Performance tracking
There is a wide array of reporting available for performance, it all depends on the systems you use. Some of the the key metrics to consider are:
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How many performance cycles did the company go through in the year?
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How many counseling sessions, warnings, promotions, training sessions were given throughout the year?
It is important to look at all these numbers as a whole, as HR can identify patterns when all information is readily available. It can be quite time-consuming to be looking for these numbers, so a good idea is to have systems in place, where such actions get recorded as the year progresses.
Pulsing also plays an important role, giving you an overview of your company’s wellbeing as a whole and of each team. Creating annual graphs of your staff’s energy and stress levels can help you identify patterns in the data and any seasonal variations.
Demographics Reporting
Demographics reporting dives into the number of male vs female employees in your company, pay gap in between male and females and pay gaps according to seniority levels in your business. You could also be looking at your full staff complement median age, managerial median age, as well as nationality or cultural background for diversity purposes linked to affirmative action.
All of the information you gain from this reporting will be used in your Employment Equity reporting. If you decide to do this, a good idea is to mimic the format of the report you need to submit on a yearly basis on your own database, so when it is time to submit, the information is already structured in a way that makes the submission easier.
In summary
When assessing your demographics, your general turnover, recruitment efforts, promotions, warnings, resignations and terminations, you will get an understanding of where the company is at from a people point of view. Whilst you could deep dive into very interesting reporting linked to each of these areas, keeping the basic numbers on top of mind is essential for any HRBP.
Having this data available will shift the conversation from a qualitative nature, to a quantitative one, being able to measure outcomes and benchmark them against previous years. Instead of saying “People are happy in this company,” you could be saying: we had a 5% turnover rate, we recruited 85% of roles organically, we ran 2 cycles of performance, 50 training sessions, promoted 8 employees, counseled and warned 3 employees, we had 3 people resign and 2 people terminated. The average performance score for cycle 1 was 3.25 out of 5 and for cycle 2 was 3.15 out of 5.
Now that is a wrap for the year!
