Employee-Oriented Metrics

What are the key metrics that you use to manage your business? Undoubtedly, they include the “big three” of sales, profit and cash flow but do they include any metrics to measure employee related items. In a world where many companies profess that “people are our most important asset,” most companies are shockingly devoid of any metrics about the mindset and welfare of their self-proclaimed most important asset, their team members.

Does your company regularly monitor any employee-oriented metrics in its regular reporting?  Now I am not talking about some sophisticated survey of the employee base that takes a lot of time and costs a lot to properly design and execute. I’m referencing metrics like: Employee Turnover, Quick Turnover Cost as well as safety metrics like Lost Workday Injury Rate and Total Injury Rate.

Please share with your fellow VIA members what employee-oriented metrics work best for you and why.

What’s Your Approach … Train or Hire the Skills Your Company Needs?

Recently there have been numerous media pronouncements that, despite record unemployment levels, employers are finding skills shortages and mismatches as they look to add to their overall staffing levels.  A growing number of employers are taking the approach that, in order to keep staff levels at the optimal level and with the appropriate skill sets, they need to up-skill existing employees and then recruit at the easier to fill lesser skilled positions.

So what’s your company philosophy and why?  Are you enduring long recruitment cycles as you look for that “perfect” fit or are you taking the approach of increasing the skill levels of your existing employees through formal training, on-the-job training or a mixture of both?

Joe Klocko

Director, Center for Applied Competitive Technologies

College of the Canyons