The 4 People and Talent metrics every Founder should know

One of my favourite approaches to bringing visibility to your employees around how your company is tracking is The Balanced Scorecard. This is typically 12-16 ‘key metrics’, some generic, some unique to your business, that unify all employees and help give clarity in a sea of data points.

These metrics typically fall under 4 categories (aligned with most Founder priorities) - People, Customer, Product and Financials. I’ll save Customer, Product and Financials for another time (although the best People functions need to be thinking about how they can impact all 4 categories), but focusing on People, these are the ones I’d go with and how I’d track them.

Engagement Score

• Purpose - Are our Employees engaged?

• Pro - If we take the 4 People Products in an earlier article, then we know Engagement is the key to High Performing teams.

• Con - It’s a moment in time snapshot and could be ill timed

• Reporting Frequency - Monthly to help alleviate the con

• Target - 80%

Regrettable Attrition

Purpose - Are we losing our key talent?

Pro - Removes the noise that can come from general attrition rates. Employee turnover is inevitable and healthy but losing the key talent in your business is not

Con - Sentiment when employees leave can sometimes be defensive, leading to no one being regrettable

Reporting Frequency - Monthly

Target - 10%

Quality of Hire

Purpose - Are we hiring the right people?

Pro - Removes the noise from hiring velocity into what really matter

Con - Long lag time to really know - often 12 months. % of probation passing can be a useful barometer in the shorter term

Reporting Frequency - Monthly

Target - 90% score at least a ‘good’ 12 months after joining in perf review

There are a lot of variations on how you can measure this and it’s really dependent on the company's routines and mechanisms. But the sentiment of why this is the most important metric is the right one

DEI Score

Purpose - Do we have a Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive environment?

Pro - A key pillar of both of performance (diversity) and engagement (equitable) and experience (inclusivity)

Con - No one defining metric, rather an amalgamation of multiple separate data points

Reporting Frequency - Monthly

Target - Dependent on the algorithm used to define it (gender pay gap weighting, leadership diversity weighting etc)

It’s important to note that these are high level metrics that have layers to them - as always with data, it tells you where the problem could be but not what the root cause of the problem is. That takes further investigating with your People and Talent team.

That said, they are a great way to show your priorities as a Founder and orient the team around a few key metrics. It sure beats scrolling through 50 and trying to make sense of it all!