How to Hold Your HR Team Accountable with Goal Management

 Employee accountability can be a crucial part of ensuring that everyone in an organization is putting forth their best effort—driving productivity and results. While many organizations use goal setting and management to drive accountability for product development, customer service, and other “front line” staff, it’s also important to track human resources department goals and hold HR teams and leaders accountable for their responsibilities.

While human resources teams are usually in charge of enforcing accountability—tracking employee performance to monitor whether employees are meeting goals or falling behind—they also need to be held accountable to help ensure that HR department goals are met. Goal management can be an integral tool for ensuring HR teams are able to demonstrate high accountability.

How does goal management improve employee accountability? What are some example goals of HR managers that should be met? What about HR team goals?

How goal management improves employee accountability

Goal setting and management can help any team create (or improve) employee accountability in several ways:

• Creating a shared purpose among HR teams. Having common goals for a team helps to foster a culture of responsibility and accountability. Nobody wants to be the one person who let the department down. With shared HR goals, some HR department staff may be more motivated to help out those who are struggling with specific tasks.
  
  
• Enforcing individual responsibility for specific metrics. Individual employee goals help people take ownership of their work since they’re being held to a set standard. This can be just as important for HR teams as it is for “front line” employees.
  
  
• Giving HR professionals measurable progress targets. Sometimes, it can be hard for employees in any department to feel motivated when their goals are too big, far off, or reliant on others. Effective goal management helps create smaller, specific, and achievable goals to motivate employees that they can be held responsible for. This helps to foster accountability in all departments—including HR.

7 leadership goals of HR managers to track

What types of goals should be tracked for HR leaders? What overarching human resources department goals will help increase accountability for HR leads while helping move the needle for an organization’s overall business goals?

This can be tricky, since many HR goals may not be directly controlled by HR managers/execs. However, tracking these strategic HR goals can be important for identifying issues within the organization and creating strategies to improve them.

Here are a few HR manager goals to consider:

• Cost per hire. How much does the business spend on employee acquisition per hire? HR leadership should be providing strategies for minimizing employee acquisition costs while improving retention.
  
  
• Voluntary employee attrition. How many employees are willingly leaving the company per month, quarter, or year? High rates of employee attrition can be indicative of a systemic problem in the organization, issues with specific managers or job roles, or flaws in the employee retention strategy. HR managers should watch for high voluntary employee attrition and devise strategies to prevent it.
  
  
• Time to productivity. How long after a new employee is hired does it take for them to start being productive? While there will always be some variance in how long it takes for employees to start being productive based on their job role, if the time to productivity metric for employees falls well behind the industry average, it might be time to reconsider the organization’s onboarding and employee training processes.
  
  
• Time to hire. How long does it take to hire an employee? While hiring timelines will vary depending on how strictly employees need to be vetted for a given role, if the time-to-hire is too long, it can hurt productivity in departments that desperately need personnel. Tracking time to hire helps HR managers stay on top of potential issues that may cause delays in the hiring process so they can suggest solutions and keep hiring timelines short.
  
  
• Employee satisfaction. How happy are employees with their work? Do their job responsibilities and rewards align with the expectations set during the hiring process? Tracking employee satisfaction helps HR leaders determine if there are issues that may be affecting employee retention. By creating fixes for these issues, HR managers can help increase employee retention so the organization can maintain higher productivity and minimize recruitment expenses.
  
  
• HR expense to revenue ratio. How much money is being spent on HR needs in comparison to the company’s total revenue. While HR is important, spend on human resources shouldn’t exceed what the organization can afford. An organization’s overall size and budget will be the primary criteria to determine what their HR spend should be.
  
  
• HR staff to employee/worker ratio. The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) highlights this statistic as a “way to compare HR staffing levels across and within organizations.” While the ideal HR team to worker ratio may vary from one organization to the next, it should be high enough to allow employees to avoid serious bottlenecks in any given HR process, but not so high that HR team members are sitting idle.

5 goals to track for HR professionals

If HR managers are mostly concerned with strategic-level goals and ensuring they can be met, what kinds of employee goals should HR team members keep track of an be accountable for?

Some examples of goals that can help drive HR employee accountability include:

• HR service tickets closed. How many employee service tickets do members of the HR team handle each day? How frequently are employees able to get resolution for the issues they bring to HR? Tracking HR service tickets closed helps businesses keep track of how effective their HR teams are at providing important employee support services (which can help drive employee satisfaction and prevent voluntary turnover).
  
  
• Time to resolution for service tickets. How quickly can an HR team member resolve specific types of employee problems? Are employees going in circles getting redirected between different HR team members? If reporting issues to HR is too much of a hassle, employees may opt to avoid making reports—they’ll just quit instead. So, tracking how long HR staff members spend on resolving calls or complaints from employees can be vital.
  
  
• # of new hire interviews conducted. In organizations where HR team members are part of the interview process, tracking how many interviews HR personnel are part of can be an indication of how dedicated they are to supporting the hiring process. However, this metric may be less valuable for organizations that aren’t consistently brining on new employees on a regular basis.
  
  
• # of recruitment calls. How frequently are HR personnel reaching out to potential employees to bring in fresh talent? This is a recruitment activity metric that can help establish how much HR team members are working towards hitting recruiting goals.
  
  
• New hire quality. When new employees are brought on board by the HR team and have been able to become productive, how do their managers and fellow team members rate their performance? New hire quality can be an indicator of how well HR team members are vetting job applicants and preparing them for integration into the company’s culture and work processes.

Need help tracking HR performance metrics and other internal statistics? Reach out to BrightGauge today to discover how you can create custom data dashboards that make tracking any department’s (or employee’s) performance fast and easy!