The Conference Boards Stephen Gates produced a good piece of research around the use of what he calls people measures ” turnover, employee satisfaction, diversity,…

The key question is: Are companies using people measures to achieve strategic goals? We all know that people are the key for the success of organizations, but are we able today to report in a meaningful and useful way for managers?

From the survey results, the people side of the business seems still to be perceived more as an art rather than a science. Only 12% use significant people measures to make strategic decisions, only 5% use them in a causal model, only 9% link people data to customers. Old news you may say, as it is the holy grail of business performance.

But there is some hope, especially around two concepts/practices coming out of academic work and consulting. First is to focus on the pivotal or key roles in your organization. The pivotal role is a fancy way to re-formulate the 80/20 rule: 20 percent of your employees or roles will generate 80 percent of your profit. Work only on those critical jobs, create some deep competency profiles and use those for recruiting, training and developing people. The second practice is to finally use the causal linkage with strategy maps, or in other words, improve your investment decisions by understanding where your investment will have the most impact.

Those two practices give some hope and direction on where to go, and there is also some good news in the report. 84% of respondents plan to increase the use of people measures in a more strategic way, 63% of senior management already monitor those on a quarterly basis and 15% of the companies report people measures externally.

However, we would add to the assessment of the Conference Board the emergence of another light in the tunnel: more and more companies today are starting to have the means of their ambition. Thanks to talent management technology, data are often available for the first time. So, as often in social sciences, we need enough data to understand the drivers and finally to gain a little more science to drive intelligent decisions ” so dont wait to start measuring more than efficiency!