Building an HR Dashboard: A Step By Step Guide

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HR (Human Resource) Dashboard- let’s break the jargon. Imagine you own a company. You want to monitor and check through your teams’ performance. You want your manager to provide you with a quick overview of the same. What if the manager handles you a report? You would not only be reluctant to go through them but would not be able to access the accuracy of the employee data. In this backdrop, the HR Dashboard becomes pivotal for stakeholders to access real-time data while understanding the important trends within their organizations. Therefore, with access to accurate data, the stakeholders make data-driven business decisions to make their organizations stand out within the industry.

What is the HR Dashboard?

HR Dashboard is a business intelligence tool, which helps stakeholders visualize key performance indicators and other data points related to employee lifecycle and communicate critical insights to important stakeholders such as HR Executives, Managers, and CEO.

The Main Features of a Human Resources Dashboard:

1. Real-Time Access

The data analytics are further shared with the important stakeholders associated with the HR Team to better assess the employee lifecycle of hiring, training, payrolls, and company work culture accurately. The HR Dashboard often provides compelling and interesting outlines to help monitor business strategies.

2. Data Accuracy

Since HR Dashboards offer real-time data analytics and refreshes, it becomes convenient for the stakeholders to identify data inconsistencies if any, and understand key industry trends to monitor business growth. Sometimes, HR dashboards are directly connected to the HR Systems thus leading to automation of the the data updates and displaying data with great accuracy.

What is the Purpose of the HR Dashboard?

1. Provide Real-Time Data

Through the HR Dashboard, the stakeholders such as the HR Team, CEOs, Project Managers, and Supervisors, can access updated employee data. Hence, they only have to click on different metrics to carve their insights and take a bird’s eye view of the entire business scenario.

2. Help stakeholders study industry Trends

Industry trends can be visible in the employee retention rate and the performance indicators of the employees of the companies. These not only help the external stakeholders like the recruiting team to hire skilled people but also the internal stakeholders such as the training and upskilling team to enhance their skilling procedures to make their employees adapt to the fluctuations within the industry.

3. Make predictions

The dashboards serve as important data visualization tools with graphs and chats. The HR Dashboards, help forecast hiring trends, optimize hiring timelines, and forecast training procedure enhancements through employee KPIs and employee performance rates while feedback mechanisms can help improve company work culture to better enhance employee engagement.

4. Take Data-Driven Decisions

These indicators and analytics predictions can help stakeholders along with CEOs make data-backed and data-driven decisions to elevate the employee retention rate as well as improve the SOPs related to the employee lifecycle.

Designing the HR Dashboard

1. Identify the purpose of the HR Metrics Dashboard

The purpose of the Hr dashboard is basically to track, monitor, and analyze the KPIs of employees, and maintain track records of the company turnover rate. Three main purposes:

Monitor key Metrics
Employee Productivity and Performance
Risk Management

2. Define Key Metrics

While designing the Human Resource dashboard, we must ensure that the metrics align with the purpose of the dashboard in the first place. Besides, the metrics are the major tools that track the efficiency, productivity, and positive growth of the employees. Additionally, they also act as work culture indicators.

What could be the essential metrics to be considered?

Recruitment Metrics:

These metrics basically deals with the hiring strategies of the company basis the frequency of the vacancies. They involve the time to hire, cost per hire, and employee retention rate. Besides, these hiring, metrics could be further categorized into the the employment type and duration of employment.

Employee Performance:

These human resource metrics include the performance review, growth trajectories of the employees, and the key achievements of the employees within the organization.

Engagement Metrics:

These HR Metrics basically indicate employee satisfaction through feedback mechanisms and single-user surveys to assess the company’s work culture. This also indicates the productivity in the employee contribution to the business and absenteeism rates.

Diversity & Inclusion:

These metrics are the yardsticks of workplace parity, pay scales based on gender, and minority representation.

Compensation & Benefits:

Average salary, benefits utilization, bonus distributions.

3. Gather and Clean Data

Data Collection is a pivotal step before building a dashboard. Hence, the collected data must be clean, structured, and organized to get proper dashboard results.

Tools for Cleaning the Data

Remove irrelevant, duplicate, and outdated data
Standardize data and name formats
Ensure data consistency across departments

Data Collection Tools

Surveys using tools such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms
Spreadsheets such as MS Excel and Google Sheets for Data Entries
HR Systems such as Applicant Tracking Systems, and HR Management Systems help maintain the HR-related metrics and information.
CSV Files help save data in a tabular format

4. Choose the right tools

While building a human resource dashboard it is essential to pivot the integration of data analytics into data visualization with the right tools. Some platforms offer customization of the dashboard templates for various categories and hence they become extremely handy for the HR Teams.

Dashboard Tools: HR Metrics Visualization

Microsoft Excel/ Google Sheets

Amazing visualization tools for small data sets and build dashboards accordingly.

Tableau

A popular visualization tool among data scientists. In any business, Tableau helps the HR Team to build extremely interactive dashboards and compelling visualizations. As a result, the stakeholders can navigate easily through the dashboards to gain compelling insights.

Power BI

An advanced visualization tool to design dashboards for the HR Team. They not only have strong automation features but also more real-time data analytics. In addition, Power BI has robust integration capabilities for visualizations.

Other popular HR Dashboard platforms

Include Bamboo HR, Zoho People, and Workday which offer built-in dashboard templates for convenience and efficient dashboard designing.

5. Data Visualization: Design the layout and visuals

Data becomes digestible when complex topics and critical insights from analytics are presented with proper visualization elements. They include the adequate use of graphs, charts, and tables to showcase the insights more interactively and compellingly.

Best Practices for Dashboard Design:

Clear and Simple Presentation

It is better now to overcrowd the dashboard with lots of data. It should seem more data-backed than data-packed!

Compelling Visual

Colors can be leveraged to indicate and highlight important trends and categories to make the visualization more promising. For example in general, say green depicts that the growth trajectory is increasing at an increasing rate, while a blue color might denote a positive growth rate. While the red color might denote a negative trend.

Interactive Elements

such filters can help the stakeholders as well as those getting access to the dashboards with more accurate and concise data. This helps them navigate from specific business goals and strategies.

6. Prioritize Automation

Automation ensures that data displayed on the dashboard is up-to-date. Sometimes the HR Systems are directly connected with the HR Dashboards thus giving more real-time updates.

Automation Tips:

Integrating data connections, HR Systems, and HR Dashboards can enhance dashboard updation. However, if automation is not possible then, regular updates can be scheduled for refreshes.

7. Test Dashboard

Before launching your dashboard you can share it with a small group of stakeholders to ensure the data is clear, actionable, and aligns with their needs. Yardsticks to check a successful dashboard:

Data Accuracy and Update
If the trends are clearly visible or not?
Can the stakeholders filter and navigate through the dashboard

If all of them tick the checklist, then your dashboard is good to go!

8. Share with the stakeholders

Once your dashboard is good to go, you can share it with relevant HR stakeholders and executives.

Communicate your dashboard

You can provide some essential instructions to guide the stakeholders in navigating through the dashboards
Check the level of accessibility of the dashboard shared such as view only, edit only, etc.

Henry Harvin-HR Analytics Certification Training

Human Resource Analytics is an intensive instructor-led four-day HR Analytics Course that is specifically designed and focused on applying the analytics techniques using R in the field of Human Resources for students with HR Specialization. The main topics covered in HRA are talent analytics, people analytics, performance analytics, and recruitment analytics. Additionally, This course will handhold the students from the fundamentals of R Programming, R syntax, variables, and operators to building data analytics models to perform the specific analysis

Who Should Enroll?

Working professionals such as HR, IT, Marketing, and Finance sectors
Students from any stream or background (MBA, BBA, B.com, BA)
Executives or senior managers who rely on large databases of customer information to make critical data-driven business decisions
IT or non-IT professionals to redefine their career
Also, Individuals aspiring to get practical exposure to tool-based business analytics

Learning Benefits

Explore+ Analyze+ Solve Business case studies using Analytics Tools such as R & Advanced Excel
Understand Data Collection methods as well as what data to collect
Develop Goal Oriented Human Resource
Gain insights about Data Measurement & Analysis from industry best practices
Communicate HR goals that is data-powered
Understand data-driven financial decisions in order to drive the company’s ROI
Helps manage risk of the macro-economic changes with predictive analysis
Implement actionable insights through Data-Driven Decisions in order to increase market share

Conclusion

In businesses, human resources are the most important. It is the skill they contribute that adds value to what companies pay for. In other words, it can be said that HR Management forms the core of the smooth functioning of the company. Hence, the HR Dashboard becomes extremely handy to the HR management team to analyze different metrics on which employees operate and other key performance indicators. Thus, Dashboards communicate the critical insights of HR Analytics to manage human resources and help key stakeholders navigate through it.

FAQs

Q1. What is an HR Dashboard?

Ans. An HR Dashboard is a visualization tool that communicates key metrics and data points related to the employee life cycle to important stakeholders such as HR executives and Managers to assess workforce performance, recruitment strategies, payrolls, etc.

Q2. Why do we need an HR Dashboard?

Ans. It enhances decision-making through real-time data analytics and helps monitor employment turnover, recruitment procedures, upskilling as well as training modules, and workforce efficiency.

Q3. What are the key metrics of an HR Dashboard?

Ans. The key metrics are :

Employee Performance
Hiring Metrics
Engagement Metrics
Inclusive and Diversity

Q4. What are the top 3 points to keep in mind while designing the HR Dashboard?

Ans. HR Dashboard has to have these 3 main features:

Real-Time Data
Adequate Visualizations
Maintain Data Accuracy

Q5. Can you list the top 3 tools to build an HR Dashboard?

Ans. The top 3 HR Dashboard tools are:

Google Forms
HR Systems
Tableau