HR Analytics

According to a 2004 Workforce Management (formerly Personnel Journal) article, “In 1978—in this publication—Jac Fitz-enz proposed a radical, anti-establishment idea. Human resources activities and their impact on the bottom line could—and should—be measured. The reaction was apathy, disagreement and disbelief” (Caudron, 2004).

For the past three decades Fitz-enz has, along with a growing band of kindred spirits, campaigned tirelessly to improve the state of HR measurement and to help both HR professionals and senior executives understand its importance.

These efforts started out at the nuts and bolts level—creating definitions for basic HR metrics such as compensation, staffing, hiring and retention. This work laid the foundation for gathering comparable data across organizations, which in turn, enabled the benchmarking of HR metrics. Over the years, a number of scholars and practitioners expanded the benchmarking of HR metrics to include investments in training and developing employees, as well as in a broad array of other HR policies and practices.

Refining and improving the benchmarking of HR metrics remained a primary area of focus throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. This benchmarking focus, while helpful in informing HR professionals about how their organization’s HR metrics stacked up to comparable or best-in-class organizations, provided little by way of actionable business intelligence on how to gain competitive advantage through people. It also contributed to an often unhealthy belief by HR professionals in simple one-size-fits-all solutions: something to the effect of, “If we can just look more like our competitors on some standard HR metrics, then we have done our jobs.”

During the past decade, this has begun to change. Advances in the software used to automate transactional aspects of the