Guest post by Alvin Ee, Aquire Product Support

For the past year or so, the business news has reported that, although the U.S. economy was struggling, productivity was increasing.  Businesses were making the most of the people and resources that survived the layoffs and cuts in expenditures.  That was always the silver lining.

Then, in August, I heard a report that productivity had started to dip.  More recently, on October 18, Bloomberg reported that “worker output per hour has fallen for two consecutive quarters…” The figures are derived from manufacturing jobs but I think it is true across the board.  Look around your workplace. Do you notice that everyone’s plate seems to be overflowing?  Productivity is waning and its cause is productivity fatigue.  read more »

No one likes regrets.  It’s that feeling that we could have done better.  We should have done something different.  It creates stories that begin with “If only we had…”.

The discomfort of having to admit that we didn’t do things right often leads employers to measure all attrition together and not break the number out to Regret Attrition and Good or Acceptable Attrition.  The managers often know the stories of ‘The one that got away…” when a key player quits.  It is critical that a company track  the loss trends of valuable, high performers or high potential employees. read more »

Much of Talent Management can be summed up by paraphrasing Jim Collins in “Good To Great”.  It’s about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats on the bus. It is paramount that you build the right paths for your talent pool to ensure that critical roles in the company stay filled and filled with the right people. Here are two  key HR metrics to help you get there:

Successor Pool Coverage:  How deep is your bench for critical roles? This is not just for succession planning in the highest levels of management.  This is about replacement planning throughout the organization.   read more »

Why should we measure employees birthdates? And, I am not talking about the cake and ice cream day.   That is a day that comes around once a year and although it is a set of numbers, it doesn’t tell you much about your workforce.   I’m talking about the date that raises awkwardness and discomfort. We need to talk about the date of one’s birth.  The day that tells us how old we are.  Squirming about this conversation tells me a few things about you.  One, you are most likely American if the age of your workforce discussion makes you nervous.  Or, two, you are self conscious about your own age.

The age of our workforce is very important.  It is often a number that is VERY relevant in aggregate, sliced by departments, regions, territories or expertise.  The marching of time cannot be ignored nor can the fact that in Western Europe, Japan and the United States, we will be facing the largest percentage of retirement eligible workers we have EVER faced! read more »

After talking to a lot of people in and around the human resource industry I have found that there is a great grasping for information about what is important to measure, why should you measure them and what do you do with the information once you have it.  So, over the next few weeks,  we are going to explore the need for and wonder of, critical workforce numbers.

Absenteeism:

When you mention measuring absenteeism to a business leader, the first thing that comes to mind is who do you fire because they missed too many days.  But, what about aligning absenteeism with other trends or metrics to get a better picture of why things might be happening?   read more »