

What are HR metrics, and which ones should you track? Read this article to discover our best picks, and build a comprehensive HR dashboard!
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When it comes to HR management, HR dashboards are one of the key tools to analyse, visualize data and take decisions to have a positive impact on your organization. They can be used to reach objectives from improving performance management to boosting employee satisfaction.
HR dashboards enable HR managers to respond to the new challenges of Human Resource Management in a changing environment. They help the HR department become more agile and proactive to lead change within the company and make data-driven decisions.
What are the objectives of an HR dashboard, how to use it? What challenges does it help your company solve? How to build your own HR dashboard? Let’s explore Human Resource dashboards.
HR dashboards are an important management tool to pilot the HR department’s actions. It aims at presenting the work and results of the HR team to other branches in your company in a synthetic manner, including:
This information is presented in a report made of tables and charts. These are built using performance metrics that have been defined according to:
The goals pursued by the HR department are varied, and could be any of the following:
Using an HR dashboard offers several advantages, such as:
These benefits make the HR dashboard an essential tool to help with decision making. Indeed, it provides an accurate, real-time overview of the current situation of human resources. Data and insights make it possible for HR managers to define a coherent strategy to take actions that will be grounded in the reality experienced by operational teams.
Though there is countless specialized software to create an HR dashboard, it’s also possible to use Excel to do so. Excel is still a widely used tool to create dashboards and present data, including employee data. Using Excel for this purpose has several advantages:
However, it also suffers from important drawbacks, which are:
Dedicated HR software can help you create custom dashboards more quickly and efficiently than using Excel. These tools can offer benefits for employee management, such as:
In the case of employee absenteeism, below are some examples of the type of graphs HR managers could access through a dashboard. This type of presentation offers a synthetic, clear outlook on related KPIs. It also provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of employee absence rates over time.
It can then be used to create reports to share this information with other teams. Reports are a convenient way to present the insight you’ve gained from data analysis and highlight details, without granting access to your full dashboard.
However, this type of software will probably be useful mostly to your HR department, though some data analysis and business intelligence features could be used by others. These are often an investment to make only after you’ve determined there is a true need for such a solution to be implemented by your company.
Before you start building your HR dashboard, you should start by determining what the dashboard should be useful for. To identify areas it should help you track and the needs it should answer, answer these few questions:
Choosing which metrics to track on your dashboard is essential. They should be in direct relation to your business, its goals and challenges, and can be tracked in real-time or in the short term.
During the creation of your HR dashboard, it is necessary to define the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you wish to measure and which will determine the success of your HR strategy.
Whether these aim to measure employee performance, recruitment or overtime hours, they should always be:
There are many HR metrics to use depending on your goal, the needs of your company and the data available on your employees. For example, these include:
Whether you choose to use Excel or a dedicated Human Resource Management software, you should decide which tool to use depending on the needs of your business.
Good software should include:
Making sure you choose the right tool to build your dashboard will save you time and money, and will allow you to make the best data-driven decisions.
Where can you source relevant data from? And how to import this data into your dashboard to get insight from your metrics?
The data relevant to your KPIs can be collected from:
To use this data for your dashboard, you will need to import it to your tool of choice.
👉 For Excel, you will need to import a file containing your data after exporting it from your database or software.
👉 If you’re using a dedicated employee management software, you could set up a direct connection between your tool and the relevant databases.
All that’s left to do is create your company’s new HR dashboard! The first step is to determine how to organize your data.
You could use the following sorting methods:
Once you’ve sorted your data properly, choose the best visual representation to get the most information out of these numbers. As a rule of thumb, use:
Human Resource Management System or HRMS is a type of software dedicated to HR professionals that can greatly improve the efficiency of HR departments. They can automate a wide range of HR processes, including recruitment and employee training, talent management and more.
They can streamline the creation of dashboards and custom reports with intuitive tools to automate daily tasks and powerful analytics tools. They help your company review important HR metrics in real-time to feed your thought process.
Our selection of the best HRMS software can help you choose the right tool for your business.
During the last few years, companies have embraced the digital revolution. Nowadays, Human Resource Management also implies the use of ever-more-powerful tools to analyse and track KPIs and manage employees efficiently.
Keeping track of the vitals of your business and using data and business intelligence tools to make informed decisions is key to anticipating change and reacting quickly. Detecting bottlenecks and defects in your processes early can help you be more agile and build a solid competitive advantage.
You should consider using the latest technology available to build an accurate HR dashboard: save time and money, foster employee engagement and attract talents with a cutting-edge HR strategy!