HRMN 395- Week 5 Discussion

This week is all about metrics! Metrics are merely measurements that are expressed in percentages or numerals that can be used to evaluate or give information about the success of our actions or programs. The course module, self assessment, and reading material for the week provide excellent foundational material that I urge you to review prior to applying your knowledge in the following questions and your next presentation. See that I designed a PowerPoint presentation about metrics for the second assignment that seems to be very helpful to students.

Note the following:

• We do not use the term matrix or metrics system when referring to metrics for this assignment
• We can use the term metric (singular) and the term metrics (plural) but we need to use their respective appropriate verbs (a metric is or metrics are).

Many Chief Executive Officers (CEO’s) and Chief Financial Officers (CFO’s) complain that their Human Resource professionals do not report metrics about Total Rewards or otherwise that matter to the organization or share relevant information. We want you to be able to provide metrics that are relevant to the organization – metrics that matter.

After selecting a metric for this discussion, ask yourself what does the metric that I am proposing tell me about the effectiveness of the Total Rewards program? It must relate to Total Rewards to be a relevant metric for this discussion and for your next presentation. Revenue, profit, customer satisfaction are good data to know, but they are not good metrics for this assignment.

Further, the percentage of turnover is not important by itself as a metric, but the metric of the percentage of the highly valued employees who are leaving the organization and why they are leaving is helpful to know since the data should tell us if the rewards currently offered are a factor in those valuable employees leaving. Whether employees are happy is not a helpful metric (nothing against having happy employees but the organization would be better informed if it knew whether the employees are engaged in their work because of the total rewards). A metric that reports the percentage of the employees who are satisfied with the organization is not as helpful as knowing by individual segment of employee which benefit is of most value, through a forced ranking of the benefits. Therefore, do not select turnover as a metric on its own, do not select employee satisfaction on its own, and do not select revenue, profit, customer satisfaction, or productivity as a metric.

Please keep this information in mind as you answer the following questions and design your second presentation, due this Sunday by midnight. The second presentation and your final assignments will continue to use the organization you used in your first PowerPoint presentation.

1.  Give an academic definition of the term metric (with an in-text citation and full reference)

2.  Discuss why, in general, metrics are important for HR professionals to report. For example, they can assist the HR professional in achieving their goals and objectives while also assisting the whole organization. For example if innovation is a core capability of the organization, tracking the level of turnover of the individuals who have had the most success innovating would be important along with knowing why these individuals are leaving. This metric would allow the organization to change incentives or other rewards, if needed, or look for other ways to retain the needed talent.

3. Share an example of one metric you are considering for your second MS PowerPoint presentation when you will present three metrics to evaluate the success of the total rewards program. Assignment 2 is due at the end of this week.

State or describe:

• A metric you are considering for the next assignment (typically a metric is an outcome and is presented as a percentage or index).
• What the metric tells the organization about the effectiveness of the total rewards program
• How the metric aligns with the organizational capabilities (what it does best)
• How the metric aligns with the employee competencies (the knowledge, skills, and abilities)
• How the data for the metric will be collected (for example, through an electronic survey, exit interviews, data from the Human Resource Information System (HRIS), focus groups or something else)

In your responses to other classmates this week, try to provide relevant yet respective questions to your classmates to help develop a metric or a few metrics that will matter to the organization. They should meet the following criteria. A metric will be acceptable for the second assignment if it:

• Evaluates the total rewards program of the organization
• Aligns to the organization’s capabilities or employee competencies
• AND data can be collected for the metric (you do not have to collect the data but you will describe how you could collect it)