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Analytics — How to Find the Right Metrics

cloud-computing-numbers-analyticsAnalytics can help you answer questions and solve problems in your organization — maybe a number of your high performers have been leaving lately and you want to know why. To use analytics effectively to answer those questions, you need to know what to measure. How do you know what to measure? A few standard metrics that companies often track include turnover, absentee rate, employee engagement, training ROI, and time to fill. But each organization is different, and a key metric for one company may not be as important for your organization.

You don’t want to waste your time tracking the wrong metrics or measuring without a purpose. Here are a few questions to ask when trying to decide which metrics to measure:

  • Is it tied to a business goal? Maybe your business wants to decrease turnover by 5 percent. Or maybe you’ve set a benchmark revenue goal. Whatever the case, identify and track the metrics that can help you get there.
  • Does it solve a problem? Do you keep losing your best and brightest employees in a particular department? There is probably a root cause. Identify problems, then determine the metrics to track to help you solve them.
  • Are we measuring this just to measure it? Just because a software vendor or a competitor emphasizes tracking a certain metric, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily important for your organization. Instead of keeping up with the Joneses, take a step a back and consider whether it helps your company. You may save yourself a lot of time and resources.

Once you figure out the right metrics to measure, you can start analyzing those metrics, getting insight into trends and changes over time, and solving problems for your organization.

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