I'm looking for advice on HR Scorecard best practices:

Suggested vendors?
In house development?
What to measure?
How often?

I'm starting with a blank slate, not many of us have implemented an HR scorecard. Our team is keen on implementing a scorecard to better measure HR's impact on the organization, add structure and accountability, and to measure successes and opportunities. Any thoughts, suggestions or best practices are appreciated.

Thank you!

I saw this book at Barnes & Noble... I didn't buy it, but flipped through it.

The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance by Becker

It's got 23 reviews on Amazon.com

Maybe this will be a helpful start for you.

Having done this project recently with a firm in the fiancial industry, here are my tips and lessons learned:
- Measure outcomes of importance to the business. No one outside HR cares about seats in classes, benefits changes processed, ER claims, handled, etc. We created this focus by looking at the overall business' strategic plan and asking ourselves, for each objective, "How does HR contribute to this?" List those results HR delivers, then identify ways to measure them.
- Use an HR steering committee that includes, at least at the beginning, the head of HR.
- The Balanced Scorecard framework is a decent one, although feel free to innovate it to meet your needs.
- Keep things simple, like 6-10 key measures. You can always add more later when everyone loves the scorecard and wants to improve it.
- For each measure, ask yourselves, "what would we do if this metric went below this level?" If the answer is "nothing, just kep an eye on it" then it is not actionable or action-provoking. Ditch it and try another.
- Show your draft scorecard to the business, with sample data. If they can't get more excited than "Oooh, pretty colors" you have a disconnect.
- If you create thresholds, use the green-yellow-red protocol. Above the threshold is green, within some tolerance (~15%) below the threshold is yellow, and below that is red. This makes it easy to spot the issues.
- Publish your scorecard quarterly. More often is tedious and little changes.
- Add commentary / interpretation to each scorecard you publish. Some people like to read the commentary, which can not only highlight the issues but also explain any known causes and what is being done.
- Beware of ruts: presenting the scorecard at all-hands HR meetings or senior leadership meetings every quarter. People tend to tune out. Just summarie any key findings and, more importantly, action taken and, even more importantly, results / improvements achieved. The scorecard itself is only valuable if you use it to drive change.

That's it off the top of my head - hope it helps.

Andy Beaulieu
andy at resultsforachange dot com
www.resultsforachange.com