HR Hacks for Leaders: Measures of People Success
Our family recently visited an arcade where dartboards were everywhere. A friend was with us who had played darts for years, so he taught some of our family members and friends to play darts – also known as cricket. I’ve seen dart boards for my entire life, but I had no idea how the real game was played. When a dart board was present, I was usually trying to avoid drunk people with darts (survival) and too busy socializing with others (connection). You know – that experience of learning the game of darts is not that different than supervision these days.
How many of us are just trying to survive and find connections during a multi-year pandemic? Employee turnover is high. Budgets are tight. And many of us are understaffed. However, we can have years of experience being around supervisors (or dart boards) and not really understand the structure and rules of the game. All we need is some time and a knowledgeable (and preferably fun) teacher to help us. That’s my hope for this blog series. I’m asking you as a supervisor to take some time and let me teach you the structure of managing people. I’ve worked in human resources for the last 25 years, so I’m sitting on many lessons learned.
I’ve named this series – HR Hacks for Leaders – because few supervisors have the time to dedicate hours to learning and much less time to implement the learning. So, this series is a gift to you. Today I will share how to measure people success as a supervisor. In the second post, I will help you take a deeper dive into a key HR metric (turnover) which will open up new data for you. In the third post, I will parcel out how you can build constant feedback loops for yourself in ways that feel human and not too awkward. In the final post, I will list the steps in conducting a pay equity assessment, which is really helpful when your employees ask for more money. So, let’s get started.
You are a supervisor, which means you have anywhere from 1-100 people under your supervision. How do you know when you are supervising well? There are hundreds of ways to track employee information; however, you really want to measure what helps you and your employees most. And you also need to learn what information you can access. The following recommendations offer ways you can formally and informally measure this information. If you are new to your role as a supervisor, it’s a great idea to meet with the HR person to get an overview of your team.
I’m suggesting that you create a high-level dashboard that provides leading (short-term) and lagging (long-term) indicators. Here are the five metrics that I recommend for tracking. I’ve included questions that can help with short-term tracking while your organization may be able to provide more long-term tracking.
1. Employee engagement – Engagement is different than satisfaction or happiness. Employee engagement is a measure of your employee’s commitment to your organization. An employee could be happy at a job but not show up or really work hard in the job. Larger organizations track employee engagement through annual surveys and more frequent focus groups. However, you can track engagement with these observations:
a. Who shows up to work every day? (P.S. Please just observe this metric yourself and don’t use tracking software.)
b. Who is participating in meetings? What’s the level of engagement when your team gets together?
c. What is your team getting accomplished? Is it timely?
d. Are employees recommending other people to work on your team?
2. Turnover – Turnover is a really key long-term metric for supervisors. Turnover is the amount of people who leave the company in a given year. Companies and HRIS companies measure turnover in several ways, which creates frustration in the HR field. To make it simple, you can just take out a piece of paper or use online software to list each of your team members and how many of them are new in the last year. Divide the number of new people by the total number of people on the team. That’s your current turnover rate. Some things to consider with turnover:
a. Different sectors have different turnover rates. For example, retail can be as high as 80-100%. However, if your team’s turnover rate is more than 20% in a given year, you need to pay attention.
b. Turnover is not a singular metric, as in it doesn’t just tell you one thing. It’s a dynamic metric, which can open up doors of possibility. If you have low turnover, then you might want to explore what’s happening in your team or organization. You might have a really great organizational culture. You could also have a group of people who don’t have clear pathways to advance in their careers.
c. Turnover is also a key measure around diversity, equity, and inclusion. For a larger group of employees, you can look at your turnover rates by race/ethnicity, gender, age, geographic location, etc. Knowing the next level of your turnover data is critical.
3. Salary budget – A salary budget is typically just a line item in a budget with a summary of your entire team’s salary data. You will be measured on your ability to manage your salary budget. This budget can fluctuate when a person leaves the organization. This might create a salary gap in your budget. When you replace that person, you may need to pay a higher wage due to market demand, which creates an increase in your salary line. You will need to understand what’s included in your salary budget, so here are some questions to ask:
a. What’s included in the salary budget? Is your salary included? Do you have any full-time and part-time employees? How are they represented in the budget?
b. What are the salaries for the people who work for me? How do we calculate salaries in our organization? This is helpful information to have before an employee asks for a raise.
c. What is the budgeted amount for salary increases this year? Typically, a certain percentage is included for performance reviews and other events.
d. What happens when there is a salary gap due to an employee leaving? Sometimes this money might be reallocated into other departments without your department realizing the savings.
4. Benefits usage – Typically, benefits are a separate line item in the budget. These are usually called fringe benefits and includes insurance costs, retirement contributions, and food allowances. Fringe benefits do not usually include paid time off and training & development offerings. Knowing your team’s benefits budget isn’t the most valuable information here; it’s the use of the benefits that matter. Here are some things to consider:
a. Do team members take advantage of paid time off? Your organization may have paid holidays. Are your employees working on these paid days off? If so, then you may have a workload issue in the team or work at an organization that encourages a grind culture.
b. What are the hire dates for your employees? Hire dates may impact the depth of an employee’s benefits. Example: longer tenure may equal more paid time off.
c. What special benefits are being used by your employees now? For example, you will want to know if any of your employees are using FMLA right now because you might need to track and document some things as a supervisor.
5. Career development – Once you have some of this other information about your employees, then you can really understand what career development looks for them individually and as a team.
a. What training and development opportunities does your organization provide? This is especially important at budget time because you might want to add something in your next budget for your team.
b. How do promotions happen here? Every organization has a different process, so you will want to know the steps here and what you will need to do as a supervisor.
c. Is performance linked to pay here? Performance reviews can be tied to financial goals or merit increases based on individual, team, and organizational performance. You will want to know about the ratings system and link to pay before the actual performance review process begins.
You still with me? I realize this is a lot of information, but it’s all information you will need to know and review throughout your tenure as a supervisor. For those who cannot access this level of information, just use what you have and build from there. You might have the chance to encourage better engagement with employees through your own process.
Next week I will take a deeper dive into turnover and how you can find valuable data around retention and equity. See you next week. Until then, breathe. You got this.
Photo by Afif Kusuma on Unsplash
The is the first part in a four-part blog series. You can read more about HR policies in our blog post, What HR Policies Need to Be Updated Post-Pandemic — Loftis Partners