3 HR Reports Every Small Business Needs

They say that what gets measured gets improved. While it might not be as simple as that, it’s true that measuring key metrics helps you form a baseline and make more strategic decisions for your organization. And we don’t just mean tracking revenue. HR reports that measure the people elements of a business can make a huge impact in every organization.

If you’re new to HR reporting or just need a refresher, here are three HR reports your small business should start using today.

Hiring Reports

Hiring practices can make or break a business. With hiring, the goal is to put the right person in the right job at the right time. The hiring process itself can be quite expensive when you consider the cost of a job posting, loss of productivity during training, and the time and resources required from hiring managers. Rapid turnover can drive this cost up even more, as your organization runs through the same process again and again.

However, you may not realize how much the hiring process costs if your organization doesn’t currently measure that. Creating a hiring report can help you and your team understand where you’re spending your resources, which is the first step to determining if those are the right spending decisions. Ideally, hiring protocols should be clearly indicated in the early days of a business and can even be worked into your business plan.

The key elements of a hiring report are:

• Cost per hire: This section will outline every penny put toward hiring a new employee, including the cost of posting job ads, training, gathering materials, and spending time screening candidates and conducting interviews. This is important to track as it will be a comparison metric for the value an employee adds to your organization.
• Time to fill: The time to fill means how long it takes your organization to fill an open position. This number will likely vary based on the position, but measuring it helps you plan how far in advance you need to list a job ad to minimize the impact of a vacancy in your organization. You can also use this figure to work on lowering your time to hire and figuring out which steps of the hiring process are eating up the most time.

By tracking these metrics, your organization can start to form better hiring strategies and spend resources more effectively, rather than blindly experimenting to see what works.

Employee Value Reports

The employee value report may sound a bit impersonal, but it’s an important part of assessing an employee’s contribution to your organization. Of course, employees offer value in many ways, not all of them quantifiable; the best business owners and HR professionals will keep that in mind alongside this report. Understanding both the qualitative and quantitative value of each employee can help you identify performance issues that need to be addressed as well as top performers who deserve recognition.

Employee value reports should assess two key areas:

• Employee quality: By looking at an employee’s overall performance, retention (how long they’ve been with the company), and productivity, you can start to measure quality on a number scale. As we said earlier, this figure should be considered alongside those pieces that are harder to measure, such as culture fit.
• Revenue per employee: Measuring the revenue per employee gives you a high-level look at your organization’s workforce instead of focusing on an individual. Look at your total revenue divided by total employees to get this number. But why should you lump together the salesperson who generates revenue and the accounting clerk who processes the sale, for example? Because both are necessary to the company’s success. Finding this average can help you determine if revenue grows as you grow your workforce.

Employee value reports can help your organization make thoughtful, strategic people choices as it scales. After all, decisions around promotions, firings, and hirings all impact your people, and they should be made with the right information in hand.

Employee Engagement Report

Businesses are starting to realize just how important employee engagement is in the grand scheme of things. An engaged employee is more likely to be more productive, stick with an organization longer, and contribute positively to a company’s culture. Producing an employee engagement report regularly can help you and your team identify trends and make changes when necessary.

There are a few metrics that will contribute to the overall employee engagement report, including:

• Employee satisfaction: By measuring employee satisfaction, you can understand how employees feel about your organization and what may be hurting their overall experiences. And because these surveys are anonymous, you can count on receiving honest feedback.
• Absenteeism: Employees who start taking excessive amounts of unexpected time off may be less engaged. It’s important to look at other variables (such as flu season) when assessing these numbers and to keep in mind that taking vacations is not the same as absenteeism (and should be encouraged).
• Turnover: Your organization’s turnover rate is closely tied to how engaged your employees are. If you notice unexpected spikes in this number, it could be a signal that something needs to change.
• Goal achievement: When employees are fully engaged, they are more productive and motivated to do their best work. Paying attention to which employees are setting and achieving their goals (and those who aren’t) can help you identify who’s moving full speed ahead and who may need some help.

Employee engagement can fluctuate throughout the year due to various reasons like which season it is, a recent company event or party, and more. For example, after the company holiday party where employees received a nice gift, engagement may rise; in the middle of the busy season where everyone is working extra shifts, it might decline. Being able to track these metrics and forecast periods of decreased engagement will help drive corrective action and strategic planning.

Every organization, no matter how big or small, can benefit from HR reports like these. Taking time to look at your people from a strategic standpoint can help you make better decisions for your organization as well as create a better experience for your workforce—a win-win.

Ashley Lipman – Content Marketing Specialist

Ashley is an award-winning writer who discovered her passion in providing creative solutions for building brands online. Since her first high school award in Creative Writing, she continues to deliver awesome content through various niches.