Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

How to Develop Your Ultimate Dashboard

Setting Your Goals. Each measure in the dashboard should have a goal or target. Compile management interviews, Human Resources priorities, and set the measurement goal against the desired performance for the organization. Ideally, you will be able to determine a hard dollar amount of savings or revenue increase from the goal (such as decreasing turnover by 10 percent results in a $5 million annual savings), or you will be able to tie back a stated executive priority (such as, We promote a culture of promoting from within).

Modeling Your Measures. You have already determined what the executive’s priorities are, and now you need to model what the metric will look like. What data will you need? What best practices exist that are appropriate for this measure? Model your metric using mock data in Excel and shop it around to others for feedback. Make sure to validate your decisions.

Building Your Metrics. This is the actual work of creating the metric using real data. If you have an ad hoc tool this could be user-accessible; if not, you may need the support of a technical resource to build the reports for you. If you do need a technical resource, modeling the metrics becomes critical to your success since your report developer needs to understand exactly what the report is supposed to do.

Building Your Dashboard. Think of your dashboard as a collection of well-focused reports on one page. After you have your reports created, you can begin think ...