What is an HR Dashboard? The Perfect Tool for your Human Resource Management

In human resource management, HR dashboards are essential tools for analyzing, visualizing, and making decisions that have a positive impact on your organization thanks to precise indicators.

Like other complementary HR tools, they allow you to respond to the new concerns of human resource development and provide the manager with an overview of workforce performance.

Let’s zoom in on HR dashboards, examples, key functions, what HR dashboards include, and tips to build relevant HR dashboards for your business.

The HR dashboard is a tool that summarizes information reports and HR indicators. This HR management tool makes it possible to identify specific employee insights and visualize the results. The HR dashboard is, finally, a valuable tool that helps in decision-making. It is a key instrument for efficient reporting!

Thus, the Human Resources Department will be able to analyze the organization's data and use it to align its actions with the objectives set by the manager.

The objective of an HR dashboard can be different from one organization to another because it is possible to follow a whole bunch of HR metrics.

There are lots of types of HR dashboards. Here are the top 3 most common ones!

This dashboard focuses on the workforce performance of the employees. It gives the managers a global vision of how their employees work and their situation. The most used indicators are the absenteeism rate, the evolution of employees, the average tenure, the involuntary turnover, the average overtime hours worked by your employees, employee productivity, etc.

This dashboard is not only for your current employees but also for new employees. It informs us of the evolution of new employees during their training and their engagement. The indicators are usually: first-year voluntary termination rate, percentage of employees trained, knowledge acquired through training, the training cost, etc.

Recruiting dashboards have many advantages, which is why they are increasingly used in hiring campaigns. They allow you to have a quick, synthetic, and precise visualization of the efficiency of a hiring campaign.

Here are 3 different examples of recruiting dashboards used during hiring:

• Effectiveness of communication: A recruiting dashboard can be used exclusively to evaluate the effectiveness of your recruitment communication, from the posting of an ad to the onboarding procedure. This will allow you to quickly see which channels have the most visibility, which have found the best employees, which have best promoted your employer brand, for example.

• Recruitment demands: The second example of a recruiting dashboard is to dedicate it to the assessment of hiring demands, which will determine which processes to implement in your recruiting practices.
  
• Evaluation of costs: Recruitment is a long and complex mission that incurs costs on many levels. The third example of recruiting dashboard targets all the hiring costs for the organization.

Talent management is the key to developing the performance of your organization. It is important to know who is working in your business, what they are good at, and how they work. Using the workforce dashboard will help you interpret all this information.

For example, when you analyze the workforce metrics, you can know about the evolution of full-time and part-time employees and the overall workforce. If you realize that the total number of full-time employees is less than the part-time employees, it may come from a decrease in task volume (you don't need lots of people working 40 hours a week, for example) or a financial problem.

Beyond the workforce, this dashboard also shows us the employee’s diversity ratio: Gender equality, the diversity of nationalities, differences in employee resumes in your business.

The most common metrics used are:

• The number of full-time employees
• The number of contractors
• The retirement ratio
• The average age of retirement
• The female to male employee ratio
• The turnover ratio
• The average job tenure

First of all, the HR dashboard is a valuable decision-making tool. Thanks to its data and graphs, which provide a global and synthetic view of the organization's situation, the manager or HR department head will be able to select the actions to be implemented to perpetuate and/or improve the organization's activity.

Secondly, the HR dashboard helps companies analyze the data through HR metrics. The HR dashboard metrics can also reflect employee performance. For example, a low turnover rate will reflect the implementation of an adapted and efficient talent management policy.

Nowadays, there are lots of advanced interactive HR dashboards that integrate cloud-based machine learning to track any issues and optimize all the procedures.

In the third phase, the dashboard has the capability to lead to a precise diagnosis of the organization's overall situation. This contributes to informing employees and shareholders and communicating with the organization's external stakeholders on its activities and health.

It is impossible to draw up an exhaustive catalog of HR metrics, but here are a few ideas to help you define your own HR KPIs.

The key KPIs include:

• Cost control: payroll, salary costs, insurance costs, etc.
• Demographic data: age pyramid, distribution by gender, socio-professional categories (CSP), etc.
• Compliance with legal obligations: work accident rate, percentage of disabled workers, etc.
• Social climate: turnover, absenteeism, etc.

They represent the effectiveness of HR processes in terms of cost, time, quality, efficiency, or compliance. For example:

Recruiting

• Average cost per recruiting process
• Percentage of hiring plan completed
• The time between job posting and actual hiring
• Effectiveness of sourcing: distribution of applications, the selection ratio
• Quality of hiring: % of confirmed candidates
• Distribution of candidates by gender, resume, etc.

Training

• Costs incurred/legal obligations
• % of employees trained, training days by age and qualification
• % of employee training plan completion
• % satisfaction of trainees and managers

Career management

• Percentage of positions filled by internal mobility
• Percentage of external employees

Compensation

• Average and median salary by age and gender, distribution around the internal (equity) or external (competitiveness) median
• Evolution of the results of the organization

To measure the contribution of HR to the overall objectives, select metrics that are important for your business. There isn't a single best metric, you must select the ones that meet your demands! You can find some examples online of dashboard platforms such as Qlik, Self-Service, etc.

If you want to discover more about the definition and the calculation of each HR KPI, check out this HR analytics KPIs article!

When developing HR dashboards, it is not only the presentation that will be decisive. For an optimal HR dashboard, there are several steps to follow:

• Determine the organization's demands and priorities: This first step is used to guide the choice of metrics to be included in the dashboards. Although HR metrics are all useful, they will not have the same impact on the organization and too many metrics could make the dashboard lose its effectiveness and interest.
  
• Set objectives and expectations for the use of the dashboard: This second step will enable the choice of HR metrics to be refined by confirming or refuting the initial selection made when determining needs and priorities.
  
• Establish the hierarchy and the organization of the metrics used in the dashboard.
  
• Agree on the frequency of updating and checking the data used to establish the HR dashboard metrics.
  
• Decide on the software to create the dashboard.

The HR dashboard should not just be a series of figures grouped in a simple table. In order to contribute to strategic decision-making and to be a tool that the managers can rely on, the processing and layout of its data will be essential.

To do this, the key metrics in the dashboard can be grouped by objective, by nature, by importance, etc. It is also useful to create links and interactions between the different HR metrics to be able to study a situation in its entirety.

To facilitate its reading and study, the dashboard can be translated into a colored graph. Thus, the interpretation of the results will be immediate and greatly facilitated.

Establishing ratios, growth curves, histograms, diagrams, etc. are all variations of the information that will contribute to the proper understanding and exploitation of the data in the dashboard.

In conclusion, HR dashboards help companies visualize at a glance the data needed to make decisions or to manage the organization. The HR metrics on the dashboard will therefore be a precious help in many cases to determine objectives in line with the organization's reality.

Rather than creating one large HR dashboard containing all the key KPIs deemed important for a given project, it is recommended to create several dashboards, each one specialized in the synthesis and evaluation of performance in a specific area. It is essential to select the right key metrics that meet the requirements of your organization.