The ultimate HR metrics ‘cheat sheet’: part 3

Posted On 05/12/2018

Personnel management is an exciting and diverse field to operate in. As it becomes increasingly digitized, there are more tools and more data available to optimize HR processes. In this blog series, we’ll get to the bottom of this.

As a software company servicing the HR sector, this evolution opens new doors. You probably have a lot of valuable user data, perhaps locked away in a dark corner of your platform? Then it’s time to shed some light on it! How can your SaaS platform address the reporting needs of the HR market?

To answer that question, we started this series of cheat sheets. They aim to give you an overview of the key metrics in HR, and a guide to employ them in everyday business.

In our last 2 posts, we already covered everything regarding staff management and recruitment. This blog post will discuss our third domain in HR: training & development.

This article will be interesting for you if you’re involved in processes or tools that apply to:

• Employee training & education
• Career development
• Coaching

Let’s have a closer look, shall we?

Why measure the efficiency of employee training?

68% of employees claim that training & development is the most important company policy.

Source: Guthrie Jensen Blog

We probably didn’t need to convince you of this. Giving your employees proper training has positive effects. Not only for the employees, but also from the business side.

Well-trained employees are more productive and have a sense of growth. The company allows them to grow their skill set, and climb up the career ladder. But what if your training efforts are not having the desired effect? This statistic shows the other side of the coin:

The total loss to a business from ineffective training is staggering: $13,500 per employee.

Source: Shift eLearning

But hey, no problem goes without a solution, right? With the right metrics, any company can track the efficiency of training efforts. This is also how new HR software can really stand out from the competition. This kind of reporting & insights are of great value to HR, and can be offered quite easily through embedded dashboards.

Key metrics for training & development

Now, which metrics are ‘the right metrics’? The truth is: it heavily depends. Every company has different goals and measures different results. However, there are some key training figures that can be relevant to any HR professional out there.

In the table below, we’ve included some of those key metrics. This table can serve as a starting point, or as a source of inspiration. It will help you to define more specific metrics that align to your business goals.

	Assessment score	Total hours of training followed	Training expenses	Training effectiveness index
Skill type
Employee
Course
Time

A word of explanation on some of the metrics:

• Assessment score: When you train employees, try to evaluate their performance on a specific field in the form of a numerical ‘score’. In many cases, regular assessment tests are used to score an employee’s progress on different skills. This helps you evaluate their knowledge level before and after training sessions.
• Training Effectiveness Index: This is a numerical value that expresses how effective your training activities are, compared to the goal you’re trying to achieve. This index will look different for almost any company, but the basic idea is the same. Define the parameters that influence the goal attainment, and calculate the index based on these parameters.

A KPI dashboard for training & development

The KPIs discussed above offer HR managers a framework to better evaluate the company’s training policy. But how do you present all of that information visually?

This is where a dashboarding tool comes in handy. You can present all the KPIs of a company in 1 dashboard, which allows for further drill-down on a specific employee, or the assessment of a specific training session.

Those who offer a platform for training & development can even integrate the dashboards into their own environment. The reports will be integrally part of your own application.

To catch a glimpse of an example dashboard, check out the embedded dashboard on training activities for a fictional company below.

How do you assess your training sessions and employee skills? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments!👇

Are you interested in similar example dashboards, but for other HR domains like recruitment or staffing? Keep following our cheat sheet series!