Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

Proposed Development Metrics

In this section, we present our proposed metrics for development. Development metrics are among the most difficult to create. Staffing and retention metrics have a well-defined focus and a limited group of employees to examine. Therefore, it is possible to calculate fairly precise measures. Development, on the other hand, represents an enormously diverse array of activities, many of which are not accounted for or tabulated in any information system. Furthermore, they must include every employee every year, not just a subset, such as those who leave or stay.

Our review suggests that development metrics could be created at three levels:

• Organization or organization sub-unit level.

• Intervention or program level.

• Individual employee level.

We have opted to create organization or sub-unit metrics rather than intervention or individual level metrics. Our rationale is simple: After 40 years of failure to establish intervention or individual-level measures as a viable accountability system, we see little reason to recommend them now. They are not likely to succeed. Some organizations certainly may do them, and may have wonderfully valid data that we applaud. But our interest is in broadly applicable metrics, so we have chosen a different direction.

Metric One: Development Quality. One of the chief goals of development is to have people ready to fill vacancies as needed. An appropriate metric of development quality is the percentage of vacancies that the organization ...