How do you match HR metrics to company strategy?

One thing that I've learned over the years is a lot of functions including HR function & its leader need to have full clarity on what organization's goals and objectives are. Many a times, these are perceived "Goals & Objectives " and hence they take shape in people's mind instead of what they really are. So it's important to have shared understanding on organizational Goals & objectives. So clarity and shared understanding is key. Secondly, it's utmost important that we know how to align our goals & objectives with Organization's. Support functions need to collaborate with Delivery functions to have full view of how their outcomes would look, hence ensure we look at collaborating with them to align our goals too. Articulate goals.

It's crucial to recognize that there are two distinct tasks in this context: the selection or creation of HR metrics and their subsequent analysis. However, the process of aligning your HR metrics with the company's strategy begins at the second step. Understanding your ever-changing current priorities and long-term goals is essential in determining the most appropriate metrics. Once you have prepared dashboards for one or all of these metrics, you can then prioritize them based on the stakeholders' preferences for guiding and ultimately concluding their influence on employee performance. Maintaining consistency in your chosen metrics is just as important as the initial selection process.

Start with ensuring that the HR strategies, initiatives and operations are in alignment with the overall goals and objectives of the institution. Ensure that your HR function is not operating as a separate entity that has no clarity on what the institutions’ goals and objectives are. Simply communicate! communication is key for understanding the strategic goals and objectives of an institution and is essential for a successful alignment. This understanding may be achieved by ensuring that HR is involved and engaged and has a seat on the strategic table. Once understating is achieved, then matching the HR metrics to the institution's strategy will be an ongoing process that keeps developing and growing as well as changing whenever needed.

Once the goals are finalised, we need to analyse if we are sufficiently resourced from Human Capital perspective. If not we need to start preparing the HR budget for the same and start scouting people to cater to the needs. Also look within if any IJP can be rolled out for internal promotions and laterally hire for basic jobs. This works economically as well caters towards job satisfaction of existing associates..

Once we establish that Organizational Goals & objectives are well understood by us, and we have collaborated enough to articulate "high level" priorities for the function, we must also look at local considerations to ensure we don't lose sight of how best to accommodate the local priorities. Now, pick a model like balanced score card to convert even intangible to tangible outcomes. Identify top 3 or top 5 items that impact Organization's bottomline, people strategy, operational efficiency & effectiveness, and best practices to becoming a world a Class Organization. Making HR function CoE is a good starting point to align functional goals with organizational goals, it helps cover basic hygiene and focus on future achievements.

Having established what HR's potential top 3 or top 5 priorities could be, start converting them to goals that are measurable. Remember, what gets measured, gets done. Once the Organizational Goals are understood, collaboration with delivery functions is done and you have accounted and agreed on local priorities, got in a sense of tangibility, next stop is to convert your priorities to measurable metrics that is well firmed up, looks aligned to Organizational Goals, has local flavor and is people centric. As mentioned earlier, look at making a mini-balanced score card for your function. Know upstream, downstream inputs/outputs, key contributors, source of data insights etc to finalize your Metrics. Exchange inputs to improvise.

If you want to get business results you need to empower the business owner. For example if you can visually demonstrate to the business leader the teams have excessive leave balances which is not good for wellbeing of the team but also impacts bottom line for the business. Giving leaders visibility of data allows them to them take action which is beneficial to all stakeholders.