It is essential that HR professionals understand the financial information that underpins their organisations, according to Donna Miller, HR director of European operations for Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
“It will really help you to understand how, for example, a 1 per cent reduction in staffing costs will affect the bottom line,” she said.
Miller added that when it came to HR metrics, she had definitely seen an improvement in the profession’s knowledge and skills. However, most HR teams were still only using data for transactional purposes, she said.
“You need to find metrics that will work for your business,” Miller said. “What gets measured gets managed, but what gets measured will be different in different firms. You need to link data back to the business to check it is driving appropriate behaviour.”
Greig Aitken, group head of human capital strategy at Royal Bank of Scotland Group, added that it was important to focus on measures that provided insight.
“It is about people metrics, not HR metrics,” he said. “The most important thing about data is what it is telling you. With training, for example, it is not how much you spend, it is how effective it is.”
Aitken also highlighted how important it was to measure leadership and engagement, pointing out that, when you had good leaders, engagement scores would be around 80 per cent - but that figure would drop dramatically when the opposite was true.
“The impact that a great leader has is stratospherically important to us,” he said.