Haringey Council is using HR
metrics to "test the organisation's fitness" as the public sector faces budget cuts, delegates at the CIPD’s measuring human capital conference were told.
Head of HR at the council, Steve Davies, said that measuring staff effectiveness had helped to kick start difficult conversations about poor performance and could inform decisions about where to make efficiencies.
The council uses three metrics to monitor fitness: the HR balanced scorecard, people management effectiveness, and a people management performance index for managers.
Davies said: "One of the things we measure is around customer satisfaction. What residents think about the services our staff deliver has a causal link back to the way in which we manage our staff. People's opinions of the service are based on their interaction with our staff, so it indicates how well we are managing our people."
Other areas under scrutiny include areas of direct managerial responsibility such as the number of ongoing grievances, employee suspensions or disciplinaries, as well as absence levels and attrition.
Metrics have been used to compare and rank the performance of different divisions within the council as well as the managers in charge.
If one division is doing much worse than the others and it doesn't improve over time then it enables HR to question why it is happening and offer support, he said.
"The manager performance index helps us rank their performance. Basically it’s asking: 'Are they any good at their job?' The ones that are less good, the ones at the bottom of the table, we give them support. I think that what is useful in this climate, is that it helps us start to think about a redeployment angle or moving them out of the organisation," said Davies.
He added that this ability to hold managers to account over staff performance has given HR a lot more credibility in the organisation. This is because "it shows the relationship between performance and finance," he said.
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