What are workforce planning metrics?

Workforce planning metrics gather information about a workforce from people in the business, people processes, and the wider labor market. HR professionals can use workforce metrics to track and analyze performance and leverage their findings to make data-driven decisions.

To help you understand how successful your plans are and what you should be working on improving for the future, we’ve put together a list of 22 metrics that can provide insight and guidance into your workforce planning process’ effectiveness.

1. Age, race, and gender diversity ratio
2. Headcount
3. Full-time employees
4. Internal mobility rate
5. Contract type and distribution
6. Age
7. Tenure distribution
8. Career path ratio
9. Employee engagement scores
10. Retention rate
11. Voluntary vs. involuntary turnover
12. Attrition
13. Bench strength
14. Competencies
15. People profiles and assessments
16. Quality of hire
17. Annual failed hires
18. Reasons for resignation
19. Absenteeism
20. Time to hire
21. Training ratio
22. eNPS

Strategic workforce planning metrics

1. Age, race, and gender diversity ratios

Is your organization as diverse as it could be? The most successful workforce planning processes have an inclusive hiring plan. 

When building an inclusive hiring plan, be sure to actively seek out applicants who will strengthen your company culture and bring a diversity of experience, opinion, age, gender, race, ethnicity, and any other qualities that will add to your organization’s diverse and inclusive character.

2. Headcount

Headcount is the easiest metric to measure: How many people are currently employed by your organization? 

You can break this down by departments and teams, but the principle stays the same: Count ’em up and you’ve got headcount. 

Measuring your headcount shows you what you already have, and it can serve as the foundation of your workforce management plan.

3. Full-time employees

A deeper dive into your newfound headcount metric will reveal how many people are on full-time contracts. Knowing this core number helps you better plan for change and any emerging trends in your workforce needs.

4. Internal mobility rate

Understanding the number of people who move laterally between teams adds another layer to the bigger organizational picture. It also provides insight into how many and which open roles are being filled by the talent within the organization. If you have a high internal mobility rate, it’s a sign that you have a strong succession plan.

5. Contract type and distribution 

Once you know the type of employment contracts your people are on, whether full-time, part-time, or freelance, you can leverage your diverse workforce to help scale the organization. And by taking the core number of full-time employees as your foundation combined with the needs of the business, you can better understand how many people you may need to hire part-time or as freelance contractors. 

6. Age 

As well as adding value, employing a multi-generational workforce can present HR professionals with challenges. That’s because different people will bring their own generation’s particular expectations and experiences to the workplace. Diverse, multi-generational workforces can have the advantage of different generations’ strengths and modes of thinking. When your people work together to find mutual understanding and common ground, their various strengths can come together to propel ingenuity and drive the business forward.

7. Tenure distribution

How long is the average tenure of your workforce? Can you improve it? Use the tenure distribution metric to understand who your high-potential talent is. If you notice that much of your senior leadership has been hired externally, take the opportunity to identify who to invest in with upskilling and professional development opportunities, and save on recruitment costs by promoting from within. 

8. Career path ratio

This HR metric helps calculate individual’s rates of vertical and lateral growth within your organization. It helps companies analyze the structure of their organization and how individuals with particular skill sets are placed within it.

9. Employee engagement scores

When the employee engagement score is low, it’s common to see low employee morale and productivity and high rates of attrition. Use this metric to gain more insight into where and how to invest in enhancing people programs across your organization.

10. Retention rate

Keeping retention high is always a top priority. When planning hires for the next year or cycle, understanding your retention history can help you determine which departments require more headcount and how best to allocate the recruitment team’s resources.

11. Voluntary vs. involuntary turnover

When calculating turnover, it’s important to understand the rates of voluntary and involuntary turnover. In other words, who wants to leave and who are you letting go?

If your involuntary turnover is high, consider examining the quality of your hires. If your voluntary turnover is high, you may need to evaluate your company culture and think about what and how you can improve.

12. Attrition 

Measuring attrition is critical for workforce planning because it tells you how fast people are voluntarily leaving your company.

To plan for future hiring efforts, you need to understand the resources your organization can commit to its people. A high attrition rate may show that your organization isn’t in the right place to be hiring. 

13. Bench strength

Every organization has departures, voluntary and involuntary. To ensure business operations aren’t interrupted when people leave, it’s best practice to have internal talent ready to fill in and take on the responsibility—temporarily or long-term.

Measuring your bench strength can help identify high-potential individuals on your teams. From there, you can more easily determine internal candidates for promotions or lateral moves across your organization.

14. Competencies

How skilled are your people? Do they have the knowledge and experience your business needs to succeed? Understanding where people’s competencies lie within the business helps indicate how well-equipped your organization is to face any challenges, adapt, and thrive. It can also help pinpoint where to invest in specific professional development and training programs for your people.

15. People profiles and assessments

Many modern businesses already employ their future leaders and the top talent who will help the company realize its full potential. Success lies in identifying those people and matching them with the capabilities and profiles needed to future-proof your organization.

HR professionals can collate scores and create in-depth people profiles from questionnaires, surveys, and personality tests to build a point of reference when looking to promote internally. 

16. Quality of hire

Understanding your quality of hire can help you learn from past mistakes and build on past successes. When your quality of hire is high, it helps boost retention, employee satisfaction, and overall productivity.

17. Annual failed hires

Knowing how many new hires haven’t reached their first anniversary with an organization can highlight areas for improvement. Exit interviews can help shine a light on what might be happening and give you insight into how to engage and retain new talent.  

18. Reasons for resignation

Taking note of people’s reasons for leaving at their exit interview is an invaluable way to inform future decision-making around recruitment—and prevent high levels of voluntary turnover.  

19. Absenteeism

Leverage absenteeism metrics to understand how many people are taking unplanned leave or frequent single days off at any given time. When these rates are high, it can indicate high levels of burnout and low employee engagement.

20.  Time-to-hire

Workforce planning allows you to get ahead of any urgent needs. Understanding your historic time-to-hire can help you understand where you can make improvements in your recruitment process. For example, reducing the number of interviews and overall length of the interview process may help you avoid losing out on top candidates who accept competing offers.

As your recruiting process grows more efficient (and, hopefully, your eNPS improves), your time-to-hire will shrink and your teams will grow stronger and faster than ever. 

21. Training ratio

Now that you have your new hire set up, who can train them?

Training ratio measures the number of fully trained team members versus those who need more training. If you see that you have a low training ratio, consider incorporating advanced training sessions, continuing education courses, and maybe even tuition reimbursements into your budget.

22. eNPS

eNPS is the holy grail of employee engagement. Your eNPS score will help you understand if your people are happy—and if they’ll make recruiting easy by lending a hand.

Happy employees tend to stick around—so a high eNPS score can lead to a smoother, more predictable workforce planning process.

Best practices: Workforce planning KPIs

When defining your KPIs, it’s important to establish metrics that will indicate whether or not your plan is on track to succeed. More and more successful modern businesses rely on real-time metrics for insights into what’s working, what’s not, and how they might improve outcomes.

Examples of HR KPIs to include in your workforce planning program include:

• Employee engagement rate
• Training ROI
• Quality of hire
• Absenteeism rate
• Turnover rate
•  Retention rate
• Disciplinary rate
• Grievance rate

HR professionals who identify between five and seven workforce planning KPIs are better able to effectively manage and track their progress in meeting their goals. 

Measuring with a workforce planning dashboard 

Traditionally, HR professionals use spreadsheets, paper records, or external systems for workforce planning. Using a workforce planning tool with an intuitive dashboard can help automate the process, collect data, and provide accurate, data-driven insights HR leaders can use to accurately measure workforce efficiency and planning metrics.

How Bob helps track and analyze strategic workforce planning metrics 

Bob’s Workforce Planning was designed to help businesses build data-driven, strategic hiring strategies. It gives you complete visibility into all your people data, including headcount, expected turnover and growth, and the ability to track current and future positions—in one place.

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Planning an effective retention strategy needs to go beyond analyzing retention rates and explore the factors impacting retention: culture, recognition, personal development, compensation, and loyalty.

Let’s explore some of the metrics most impacting retention:

• eNPS
• Career path ratio
• Salary change
• Diversity metrics

eNPS for retention

eNPS (employee net promoter score) measures one simple aspect of employee experience: would your employees recommend your organization to their friends?

This metrics is closely connected to retention because employees aren’t going to recommend that their friends join an organization they don’t intend to stay with. Low eNPS scores are often due to a number of factors, including poor salary, toxic culture, bad management, or excessive workload.

To increase retention, you’ll want to keep an eye on eNPS. If your overall score is under 10, then you have work to do to keep your people happy—and on your team. If you’re seeing retention issues, checking out your organization’s eNPS will help figure out if it’s a culture issue.

Career path ratio for retention

It’s safe to assume that your employees want to grow, change, and develop. Most of us want to learn new skills and become stronger contributors. Career path ratio measures how effectively we’re doing that and is closely correlated with retention. 

Career path ratio is a metric of internal movement measuring horizontal movement and promotions. While horizontal movements are often considered to be a sign of growth and can help employees develop existing skillsets and experiences, they also can decrease productivity, increase recruiting costs, and cause uncertainty among employees about job security. Promotions, however, are often used to promote engagement and retention. The possibility of promotion drives motivated employees to push themselves towards a goal; managers can use promotion paths as a means to get employees to develop pride in their work and seek more opportunities to show initiative.

Lack of internal movement is correlated with low retention—you’ve seen Office Space, you know that dead-end jobs aren’t known for generating loyalty and employee satisfaction. To understand the cause of a retention issue, examining career path issue is a great place to start.

Salary change for retention 

Is it just me or is life expensive? The landlord raises the rent, the baker charges more for bread, and no matter how much money you make, it can feel like life’s costs are increasing in tandem (except for you, Elon Musk). Measuring salary change, the increase or decrease in salaries measure team-, department-, or organization-wide, can help you identify the cause for low retention.

We all want to feel valued at work, and salary increases are a big part of that. If your company isn’t regularly offering raises and bonuses, you could be pushing employees towards more generous employees—and, ultimately, spending much more money on recruitment than you would have spent on retention.

Diversity metrics

Diverse teams outperform homogenous ones. Their employees are happier, more engaged, and more innovative. If you’re finding that your employees aren’t sticking around, you might want to think about who you’re hiring.

Age, race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status are all elements of cultural diversity that should be present and vibrant across your organization. Making sure that your teams represent a vibrant cross-section of diversity will help you keep your people engaged and loyal.

Hire for retention

From the first days of onboarding, you should be focused on retention. By keeping an eye on people metrics, you’ll be able to quickly identify potential causes of low retention and address them to keep your workplace and people happy and healthy.

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Retention has historically been a major concern of HR, and rightfully so: high turnover drains morale, hiring budgets, and available talent pools.

Want to keep your culture healthy, employer brand positive, and employees satisfied? Check out (and take advantage of!) our three tips for boosting employee retention.

1. Encourage communication

Want employees to give you their best? Make sure you want to hear it! From junior employees through the C-suite, make sure all of your employees know that their opinions are valuable.

Trust your new joiners

We can all get stuck in ruts, even if we don’t know it. New employees come into your organization with fresh eyes, and they might be able to spot inefficiencies and blockers that seem normal to you. Encourage your new joiners to give feedback. Who knows what you’ll learn?

Embrace 360 feedback

The Bob performance review module includes 360-degree reviews because everyone deserves feedback, especially managers. Empower employees to give feedback on their managers so they know their voices are heard, and your managers know how they can improve.

Talk about failure

Let employees know that communication will never be penalized. By removing the fear of negative consequences, you’ll encourage them to become more innovative in their jobs, less stressed, and more productive. IBM is an amazing example of how a willingness to experiment and accept failure created a billion-dollar business in three years.

Creating a culture where communication is encouraged from the start and making sure a candidate knows that they will immediately be heard in an organisation can be a game changer for them.

2. Give employees a sense of ownership

The endowment effect is a theory of behavioral economics positing that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them. When applied to the workplace, it posits that creating ownership around projects for individual employees allows them to feel like they are playing an important role in the mission of the company. By attaching employee’s names to their projects, they’ll be more invested in achieving success.

Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report predicts that the organization of the future structure will be based on work and projects, as opposed to business function and functional leaders. There are several organizations that are already structuring teams in this way, moving from departments to four-to-six person fast-moving cells.

3. Prioritize employee recognition

The importance of employee recognition is well-known: it increases productivity, ownership, and retention.

Sterling Livingston’s Pygmalion in Management offers some insight into how manager’s perception of employees affects their productivity. If they are convinced that the people in their group are first-rate, they’ll reliably outperform a group whose manager believes the reverse – even if the innate talent of the two groups is similar. Creating positive expectations for employees in the first year will undoubtedly lead to their success; even the smallest of compliments instill confidence. Research has also shown that compliments prove to be the very best motivator for workers, not money.

You can become a company that is known as a great place to work by understanding the importance of recognition, and that: 

“Individuals are never merely “hired hands” but bring along their heads and hearts: they enter the organization with individually shaped ideas, expectations, and agendas, and they bring with them distinctive values, interests, sentiments and abilities”
— W Richard Scott and ‎Gerald F. Davis

You can improve your company’s retention

To increase retention, you don’t have to be a big name with big, funky offices. Investing in great culture and HR best practices will help your employees stay satisfied and with your organization.

The post 3 tips for attracting top talent appeared first on HiBob.

It’s almost impossible to talk about work without bringing up salary. What we’re paid is supposed to be representative of our employer-defined worth—and, on a larger scale, how the employer values their workforce.

Salary average and salary change are both important HR metrics for measuring how the workforce is compensated as a whole, or in large groups. For companies competing for talent—we see you, EPD recruiters—salary average can help you understand your market position for recruiting. And for those fighting to retain employees, salary change can help you budget for raises and promotions on an annual or quarterly basis.

Let’s go into:

• How to calculate salary average and salary change
• How these metrics differ from other common salary measurements
• How to use Bob to measure salary average and salary change

Calculating salary average and salary change

Salary average and salary change can be measured by team, department, employee demographic, or the organization as a whole. Here’s how to measure both.H3: How to measure salary average

To calculate salary average, you’ll add up all the salaries in your chosen group and divide by the people in that group. It’s calculated based on the employee pay period and normalized relatively according to the chosen view period: monthly, quarterly, or yearly. And, because of the nature of the calculation, it only applies to those employed for the whole month.

Your calculation will look like this:

(sum of base salaries in specified group) / (amount of employees) = salary average

Average salary is especially powerful when compared with median salary. Median salary, or the exact midpoint dividing the top and bottom 50%, should be comparable to the average salary. Significant deviations point to large pay parity in your organization.

How to measure salary change

To calculate salary change, you’ll need to put in a little more effort. You’ll be comparing salaries from different intervals to understand how salaries have changed between those periods.

The calculation will look like this:

What salary average can tell you about your culture

Salary average is an important HR metric for understanding equity, diversity, and inclusion in your organization. By breaking down your salary averages by demographic (age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc), you’ll be able to identify any existing parities in your organization that go beyond roles and their differences.

Conclusion (and how to measure in Bob!)

Salary average and salary change are important financial metrics for many different aspects of your organization. By keeping an eye on these metrics, you’ll be able to make sure your people, from all teams and walks of life, are being paid what they deserve.

Want to learn how to measure these metrics in Bob?

To learn more about measuring salary average in Bob, check out this article. To learn more about measuring salary change in Bob, check out this article.

The post Metrics that matter: salary average and salary change appeared first on HiBob.

But to keep our heads above water, we need to make an effort. We need to keep looking ahead and do our best to plan for an uncertain future.

Employee growth rate is an HR metric measuring your company’s rate of headcount growth. Many of us saw hiring slow down during the pandemic, along with unprecedented layoffs and furloughs, but the market is returning to pre-pandemic levels and, hopefully, we can begin planning for a more fruitful 2021.

Let’s discuss:

• Why growth rate is important
• How to measure growth rate

What employee growth rate means for your business

Sales are booming, web traffic is peaking. If you want to keep growing your business, you’ll need to expand your teams to match.

Calculating growth rates will help you plan the rest of your goals, KPIs, and projections for the quarter and year ahead, from recruitment needs to cost per acquisition. The larger your organization gets, the more complicated its needs will be.

In an article titled Why everything breaks when you reach 25 employees published by leadership and management blog Lighthouse, the importance of understanding growth rate is explained as critical to developing healthy communication practices. “Gone are the days when you can have a team-wide standup and someone can monitor your wiki and a project management tool to understand what everyone is doing,” they write. “The reason everything breaks is not anyone’s fault…however, in order for you to grow and succeed at your new company size, you have to evolve and change how you do things.”

Growth rate is important for building and maintaining an effective tech stack. The tech tools needed to manage 50 people is different (read: smaller) than 100, 1,000, and beyond. Getting ahead of this growth with a strong, effective stack will help keep your people engaged and productive—especially while working remotely.

How to calculate employee growth rate

Employee growth rate is calculated by—well, it’s complicated. Let us show you.

You can calculate your employee growth by team, department, or period by adjusting the numbers accordingly.

Employee growth rate is a metric that matters

Measuring your employee growth rate will help you understand growth patterns in your organization and where you’re headed. Especially as we begin to recover from COVID’s impact on the economy, we can use employee growth rate as a signal for understanding overall organizational health and progress.

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Employee recognition is the act(s) of publicly and privately acknowledging individual achievements, and it’s critical to increasing your business’ bottom line. Here’s how.

Recognition and engagement are tied

Engagement is known to be an important element of culture, productivity, and ultimately bottom-line results for your business. How does recognition play into that?

Employees who feel their work is valued are more likely to be engaged in their work, according to SHRM’s employee recognition playbook. By making the effort to recognize individual employees’ achievements, you’ll make them feel like a more active, visible part of the organization and assign more value to their contributions.

Employee recognition inspires collaboration

According to employee recognition specialists Terryberry, managers who regularly recognize their employees’ achievements reduce competition between teammates. When employees don’t feel pressure to outshine or outdo each other for attention from higher-ups, they’re more willing to work together to achieve shared goals.

The collaboration specialists at Wrike associate increased collaboration with eleven business wins, including increased engagement, more productive meetings, and better innovation.

Recognized employees are more likely to stick around

Is employee recognition the key to job satisfaction?

Especially in these difficult times, where job satisfaction is being impacted by countless external factors, we can’t work hard enough to keep employees happy. Turns out employee recognition is a big part of that.

According to a study published by the International Journal of Business and Management, recognition is one of the top-five most important elements of company culture. Employees who reported feeling satisfied with the level of recognition they were receiving were much more likely to report high satisfaction scores.

Getting employee recognition right

Employee recognition goes way beyond saying, “hey, great job!”

To effectively recognize your employees, we recommend checking out these resources:

• Bonus.ly’s guide to employee recognition
• Human Resources Today’s list of employee recognition tools

The post 3 reasons you should prioritize employee recognition appeared first on HiBob.

It’s a tough question to answer. From the dreaded job application question about your preferred salary to annual or biannual salary reviews, however, you’ll have to assign a dollar value to your work.

Too high and you risk losing everything; too low and you risk underselling yourself. How do you know what’s right?

Working in HR, you’re in the position to make sure all of your people are being compensated fairly and equitably. Understanding each employee’s salary range penetration will help you do that.

Let’s discuss:

• What salary range penetration means
• How salary range penetration is connected to diversity and inclusion

<<Check out our free compensation analysis template to ensure your team gets paid fairly.>>

What does salary range penetration mean?

Every job description in your organization should come with an attached salary band—a range of salaries appropriate for the role. While there may be occasional deviations from this range for exceptional candidates, this assigned band is the standard pay for this position.

This range should stick with your hires throughout their duration of employment in this position. Using that assigned range, you can calculate their salary range penetration—meaning, how far they are into their range.

This is one of the trickier metrics to calculate. The formula for salary range penetration is (salary minus range minimum) / (range maximum minus range minimum) = range penetration.

Let’s say we’re talking about Alicia, who’s on track to get a raise in the next quarter. Go Alicia! Her position’s salary range is $90,000-$115,000, and she’s being paid $108,000.

(108,000 – 90,000) / (115,000 – 90,000) = .72, or 72%. This means that Alicia is 72% percent into her salary range, and has 28% left to go until she needs to have her position, or range, re-examined. 

How salary range penetration is connected to diversity and inclusion

Women in the United States make, on average, 81 cents to the man’s dollar., leading to a lifetime earning loss of nearly one million dollars.

While many are quick to say that’s, at least partially, because women don’t ask for enough, but that’s not the case. Men and women ask for raises at about the same rate, and women even ask for slightly more money than men (31% and 29%, respectively), but not only are women less likely to receive raises—they’re more likely to be penalized for asking.

You can often spot pay gaps by examining differences in salary range penetration rates. By conducting regular compensation audits, you’ll be able to compare compensation for employees in similar roles with similar amounts of experience. If you’re seeing that women, BIPOC, LGBTQ, or older employees have lower penetration rates than their peers, then you’ll know there’s a compensation equity problem in your organization.

<<Check out our free compensation analysis template to ensure your team gets paid fairly.>>

Salary range penetration: a metric that really matters

Salary range penetration is a key indicator of pay gaps, promotions, and equity in your organization. By tracking this important metric, you’ll know how to effectively reward and compensate your people—an important part of any retention strategy.

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It’s natural. Maybe you’ve been in your company or role for too long; maybe you don’t have the kind of clear growth HR career path you need to feel like you’re making moves. But feeling stuck is dangerous, and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Career growth is closely tied to engagement; chances are, if you’re feeling out of touch with your best career self, you’re feeling distanced from your organization too. Taking advantage of these five tips will help you get back in your groove, so you can keep giving your best to your team and your organization as a whole.

To get your HR mojo going again, try:

1. Asking yourself some questions
2. Hitting the books
3. Learning from others
4. Meditating (trust us)
5. Taking the lead

1. Asking yourself some questions

You’re the captain of this ship. If it’s time to set sail towards a new destination, you’re in charge.

Instead of waiting for a promotion or opportunity, be proactive about your wants. You don’t need a ten-year growth plan in place to ask your manager for some help planning for the future.

What’s missing in your role? Answering this question will help you, your manager, and whoever’s on this growth ride,  navigate your next career steps.

Recommended reading: Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans 

2. Hit the books

A great way to fast-track your development is to explore new qualifications. There are no one-size-fits-all criteria for a successful career in HR; however, academic study can provide you with confidence and a competitive edge.

If you’re not in the marketing for a degree program, short courses can be a great addition to your CV. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) offers courses such as Future-Focused Learning and Development and, Recruitment, Selection, and Resourcing Talent. 

Your employer might be so impressed by your initiative that they’ll fund your studying!

3. Learning from others

Ever looked longingly at the office across the hall and wondered what happens in there?

You’ll never find out unless you ask! Talk to your manager about skills you’d like to grow and develop and come up with a shadowing plan, where you’ll be able to spend some time with someone watching them do what they do and figuring out if you could enjoy it too.

Shadowing is a great low-investment way to figure out if that job really is all that and a bag of chips, or if it’s just a bag of pretzels you found in the back of your car. If it doesn’t seem like it’s right for you, no big deal—you can move on and go shadow someone else!

4. Meditating (seriously, trust us)

When your calendar is packed out with meetings and the office is fully-stocked with loud sales guys, how are you supposed to plan for your future?

We recommend taking some time alone in the circumstances that allow you to focus best to think about your next steps. Set aside a few one- or two-hour blocks to plan your future: what you want, what you don’t want, and when you want to do it. Your future is important, and it’s coming whether you plan for it or not—so you might as well take the time.

That might not mean meditating. You might think best when you’re collaging, doing yoga, or…thinking. But give yourself the time.

Recommended reading: Find Your Why by Simon Sinek

5. Taking the lead

This is your future, after all. Take the lead! Don’t wait for your annual performance review, or when you see a cool new job advertised. As soon as you start feeling a twinge of growing pains, take action. Your career will thank you.

Setting your sights high will reward you tenfold. Just like that “empty” tube of toothpaste you always manage to squeeze more from, you know you’ve got loads of fresh potential inside just waiting to come out. 

The post 5 ways to keep your HR career going and growing appeared first on HiBob.

Building a diverse and inclusive workforce has a measurable impact on your business: more productive teams, increased engagement, stronger loyalty, and quantifiable bottom-line results. Diversity and inclusion efforts often start with diverse recruiting, to build stronger teams, but once those teams are created there’s much more work to be done.

One way to build a strong, more inclusive culture is to create a diversity and inclusion committee: a guided group of employees working together on D+I projects like code of conduct creation, cultural programming, employee education, management training, and developing recruitment funnels.

Actively involving employees in diversity and inclusion initiatives is an important element of safe cultures. The opportunity to create the diverse, inclusive environment they want to be a part of will help connect your employees to your organization, its culture, and each other.

These six steps will help you set up your organization’s first diversity and inclusion committee and get your people on the road to cultural diversity, safety, and success.

1. Collect company data
2. Identify internal players
3. Build agenda and actionable goals
4. Recruit employees
5. Create mission statement
6. Build action plan

1. Collect company data

To commit to making big changes, you need to set a baseline. We recommend gathering data on factors such as:

• Gender breakdown across departments, sites, and levels
• Race breakdown across departments, sites, and levels
• Age breakdown across departments, sites, and levels
• Gender, age, and race breakdowns of per-team hiring pipelines
• Sites and spaces where job ads are shared
• Salary breakdowns by gender, age, and race

2. Identify internal players

Before beginning to recruit members, identify individuals who have been vocal about diversity and inclusion in the past who may want to take a leadership role in the committee. Having these on-the-ground advocates will help you recruit new members and come up with innovative ideas from outside of the HR bubble.

3. Create mission statement and actionable goals

Before recruiting employees to join the committee, make sure you know what you need and how you’d like to achieve these goals. By drafting and committing to a mission statement, you’ll invest in the future of the committee—and your organization’s culture.

Using the data you collected, meet with your internal “influencers” to set quarterly and annual goals for the committee, with the mission statement reflected in the company’s goals. This keeps messaging and planning consistent, logical, and safe.

Use the planned size of the committee to help guide your goal-setting. For example, if you plan on recruiting 20 members, you can split them into four groups of five people and assign each group its own goal. 

Examples of goals include:

• Analyzing hiring patterns and building more inclusive hiring funnels for different teams throughout the organization
• Creating a salary transparency program to encourage compensation equity
• Building learning and development programs about implicit bias and anti-harassment
• Writing a code of conduct 

4. Recruit employees

Send all your employees a message explaining the diversity and inclusion committee and its mission, including readings about the importance of diversity and inclusion. If you have anything company-produced, that’s amazing!

A few days later, follow up on that message with a survey for those interested in joining. Ask questions about themselves and their opinions, such as:

• Classic self-identifiers (Name, age, location, gender, team, role)
• Why they want to join the diversity and inclusion committee
• What they can add to the committee and culture
• What they can gain from the committee
• Prior involvements in D+I and advocacy work
• Changes they’d like to make or see in the organizational culture

If you don’t get enough responses to the survey, don’t be afraid to send it out again! Make it clear that people on the committee will have an active role in building the company culture they want to be a part of.

Once you have enough applicants, sit with your core group and put together a diverse committee across organizational levels, ages, genders, races, and opinions. Bringing together executives and junior employees will help you build a culture that’s meaningful for all levels of the organization, and that everyone can feel a part of.

5. Build an action plan

Build a productive committee culture by starting off on an active note. Take time during the first meeting to introduce everyone, but make sure you can go into your mission statement, plans, and goals. Aim to finish the first meeting with a list of goals for participants to sign up for and help to accomplish.

6. Follow through

Don’t let the committee stall out! After the first meeting, make sure your people are working together on the goals they’ve chosen. Set regular check-ins to discuss progress and tactics, and make members accountable for presenting their work.

Take the time in company meetings to discuss the group’s accomplishments and future plans, and encourage employees to share their participation in their CVs and LinkedIn profiles. By making participation something to be proud of, your people will be rushing to join and make a difference.

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Redeveloping your onboarding process, rebuilding your performance management, and helping your employees maintain work-life balance is only the beginning. Because once you’ve done it all, you have to take the next step: reviewing the data, drawing insights, and figuring out what your work was worth.

The impact of work from home on your teammates can’t be measured with one metric. As Shrek said, people are onions, and as he would probably say if he worked in HR, their happiness is multifaceted. To understand work-from-home happiness and productivity, let’s look at how we can measure:

1. Employee satisfaction
2. Work hours
3. Customer satisfaction
4. Retention
5. Team-specific metrics

1. Employee satisfaction

The easiest and most effective way to measure employee satisfaction is to ask your employees how they’re feeling.

In a HiBob-conducted survey of 2000 workers in the US and UK, we saw a clear, measurable impact on employee happiness based on COVID-19 and its effect on employees’ lives—and, tellingly, the lives of those surrounding them. We don’t know what’s happening to our employees’ friends, neighbors, and families, but we do know that it matters—making regular check-ins critical to ensuring their wellbeing and satisfaction.

To understand how your people are doing, we recommend regularly checking in with surveys, asking employees to both rate their wellbeing on number scales, and write about how they’re feeling and what could help increase their productivity and wellness.

While this may sound like an eNPS survey, there’s a critical difference: while eNPS surveys are structured with a specific goal, employee satisfaction surveys can be customized to your organization’s (and peoples’) needs. 

2. Work hours

Work-life balance, or the lack thereof, is a well-known problem with remote workers. We can come up with as many solutions as we want—The HR Director has 50, for example—but until we know what we’re dealing with, we can’t fix the problem.

Without coming into the office, we don’t know who’s working when—who’s coming in early or leaving late, who’s eating lunch at their desks (or not taking time to eat at all). To understand whether our employees are working too many hours, we have to ask them how many hours they’re working.

Asking employees to log their hours may be off-putting to those who aren’t used to doing so, so make sure employees understand why they’re being asked: not because you don’t think they’re working enough, but because you want to make sure they’re not working too much.

3. Customer satisfaction

The connection between customer and employee satisfaction is well-documented, and it makes sense: smooth work behind the scenes makes for a better product, and a better experience for customers.

To understand how your people are doing, then, trust your customers to give some insight. An increase or decrease in NPS after an organization change, for example, can show you how that change impacted your employees in ways they might not even have processed.

4. Retention

Happy employees stay; unhappy employees leave. To understand the short- and long-term impact of a shift to work-from-home, check out your employee retention rate. If you see an increase or decrease in retention year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter after your move, you can get a picture of how your employees are handling your move.

If you see sinking retention, that doesn’t mean you should run back to the office—something few of us can safely do right now. Instead, you can focus on building a more work-from-home-friendly tech stack, planning work-from-home cultural activities, or beginning manager training focused on best practices for remote work.

5. Team-specific metrics

Everyone expresses their needs differently, and every team feels the impact of working from home differently. To understand the impact of work-from-home on your teams on a molecular level, ask your managers to check in with their teams using metrics that are a good fit for their work.

For example:

• R&D: lines of code submitted; code accuracy
• Design: projects completed; stakeholder satisfaction
• Marketing: number of qualified leads; SEO
• Sales: closed sales; inbound and outbound leads
• Customer success: Completed tickets; customer satisfaction

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