Onboarding metrics are all about the data used in measuring the effectiveness, efficiency, and impact of the most vital part of an HR program. They are useful in empowering organizations to calculate the return on investment of each department. Well-thought-out onboarding metrics provide an opportunity for HR teams to prove how much value they can generate.
Importance of Onboarding Metrics
There are potential benefits that come with creating an HR data culture. According to research by Customer Insight, 45% of HR departments are hyper interested in people analytics. Some of the metrics that HR teams track are absence, retention, satisfaction, productivity, and recruitment.
HR teams also use the metrics to determine how appropriately various departments in the organization are staffed. The effective use of onboarding metrics can be the pathway to the creation of strategies that contribute to better human capital management.
Setting Up an Onboarding Report
When creating an HR report, it’s essential to measure specific parameters of performance. Most of these metrics are high-level and provide an overview of the organization’s performance. They are classified into four broad categories of quality, quantity, efficiency, and organisational performance metrics.
Quality Metrics
The best-known work quality metric is an appraisal by the immediate participants. Subjective assessments must be based on management by objectives. The model aims at improving an organisation’s performance by breaking down onboarding goals into individual feedback and experiences.
For the best results, the objectives should be set to improve the experience at every opportunity. The report should capture how well the goals have been met over the specified work period.
Quantity Metrics
Metrics based on quantity are much easier to measure than those based on quality. There are multiple approaches to measuring this metric. They include the number of employees onboarded, the number of steps completed, the number of documents shared, signed and delivered etc.
The metric can also incorporate the number of active employees, and employees starting work and being synced with payroll. Once you select the relevant parameter that best applies to your situation, remember to include it in the report.
Efficiency Metrics
Sometimes, the quantitative and qualitative approach to employee performance may not reveal much. For example, when a business onboard thousands of employees per year, it’s a lot harder to tell the quality of customer service offered and quantify it. To strike a balance between quality and quantity, you should incorporate the metric of efficiency.
This is a metric that considers the resources involved in attaining a specific output. This metric is useful in helping you predict future company and onboarding performance.
Organisational Level Performance Metrics
Onboarding performance metrics can help you evaluate overall HR competitiveness and efficiency. One approach is to capture the ROI generated per employee onboarded. The function is a calculation of time, value and resources. You can capture that ROI using our onboarding calculator!
The metric gives an estimate of how much each employee onboarded means for the company’s bottom line. Higher costs with fewer employees is a sign of clear organisational inefficiency, and it’s a sign that your onboarding is sub par and contributing towards bigger issues in the business.
Another approach to this metric is to calculate the profit per every onboarded employee and stack it against the cost of the onboarding. That number is going to be pretty illuminating!
Final Thoughts
It’s highly challenging to capture onboarding performance based on any one metric. The above metrics capture both qualitative and quantitative approaches to measuring performance. The reason for this is that there’s yet to be a single rule that works across the board. As a general rule, you should always be working to improve the efficiency of your onboarding programs, and the ROI if you can do that is going to be huge!
