Five useful reports HR should be producing
Everybody has questions for HR. So here are five useful reports that HR should be producing to show a useful picture of their workforce.
The role of HR goes beyond designing policies, dishing out benefits, and chairing disciplinary hearings. In fact, HR is often responsible for informing other senior members of the organisation about trends happening throughout the workforce – especially those which may have an impact on the performance of the business.
There are hundreds of useful reports HR can produce to inform business decisions. We aren’t going to try and cover these all in one article! But we did think it might be helpful to give you five useful HR reports that you probably should be producing periodically.
1. The workforce demographics Report
Reporting on your workforce demographics is a great way to see how diverse and inclusive you are as an employer. It reveals the level of representation you have from different ages, genders, cultures, and other walks of life – and will often show you areas that may be under-represented.
The demographics you choose to report on may vary, but generally speaking it will be helpful to include the following data:
- Age distribution
- Gender breakdown
- Ethnic background
- Disability status
- Seniority
- Pay bracket
- Geographic location
- Employment type (full-time, part-time, contract, etc)
Having this information can help you to plan better, and can also help you ensure you are meeting legal criteria that applies to your country or company size, such as equal pay laws.
2. Employee turnover report
Understanding the rate at which employees leave your organisation is the primary purpose of this report. It will give you insights into retention challenges, as well as the effectiveness of your engagement strategies.
In its most simple form, the employee turnover report should look at:
- Number of leavers by department and team
- Turnover rate comparison over time
- Reasons for leaving (voluntary and involuntary)
- Length of service before leaving
- Cost of turnover (including recruitment, training, lost productivity)
Some industries have higher expected turnover rates than others, so we can’t give you a yardstick to measure by as it may not apply to your business. But you should be able to get a sense for this by comparing results over time, and looking at data from other companies in your industry.
If you have high turnover rates, you may wish to look deeper into areas such as your workplace culture, compensation models, or job satisfaction.
3. Training and development report
The goal of this report is to assess the effectiveness of your company’s training and development programs. True, this may not always be HR’s job – but it often is.
A good training and development report will include fields such as:
- Training programs offered and attendance rates
- Costs of each training program
- Pre- and post-training performance metrics
- Employee satisfaction with training
- Impact on career progression and promotion rates
Training reports may also help you to see who is compliant with your office policies, such as fire safety awareness or information security.
4. Performance management report
Assuming you have a process within your business for performance management reviews, a performance management report is a good way to get a quick look at how these are going, and the impact they are having on your business.
A useful performance management report will most likely include:
- Performance ratings or scores by department and team
- Achievement of individual and team objectives
- Feedback from performance reviews
- Areas identified for improvement
- Recognition and rewards given
This kind of report can help you ensure your workforce is all working towards a common goal, and that goals are in-line with company objectives. Remember though, that you can only compare performance across departments if a similar assessment methodology is used. Comparing apples to oranges rarely gets good results!
5. Absence report
Measuring employee absences, whether due to sickness, personal leave, or other reasons, is important. And when you monitor these measurements, you can identify patterns or issues related to workplace health or satisfaction. For example, high levels of absenteeism can indicate underlying problems such as job dissatisfaction, stress, or poor work-life balance. On the other hand, low levels of absenteeism could be symptomatic of presenteeism – where people are forcing themselves to “clock their hours” no matter how sick they get.
A good starting point for an absence report would be to identify:
- Number of absence days per employee
- Absence rates by department and team
- Reasons for absence (sickness, personal leave, etc)
- A scoring system such as The Bradford Factor (although this should not be relied on as a standalone tool)
You may also wish to try and compare these absence rates with productivity and workload, to find out what kind of impact of absenteeism is having on your business.
Tie it all together with a good HR system
Finding out all of this information can be difficult if you’re still using paper files, emails, and spreadsheets to track all of your HR information.
If you’re using a digital HR system such as SenseHR then it is easy to store, track, and report on HR data such as absence, holiday leave, performance reviews, and more.
