Hello? Have I already put you to sleep?
If I just summed up your immediate reaction to this article's title, don't worry, you're not alone. Reading an entire article on processing numbers and reviewing spreadsheets is enough to render even the most enthusiastic talent development geeks drowsy. The thought that somehow, some way, all those numbers strewn across endless Excel worksheets may amplify the might and impact of even the smallest talent development teams is down-right laughable.
I'm not saying that data are a holy grail; those don't exist anywhere other than storybooks and Monty Python movies. I am suggesting, however, that being able to find a way to leverage and harness readily available—and company-specific—data provides all talent development professionals with the necessary tools and resources to build a solution that will enable them to prove departmental impact. With these data—presented in a clear, systematic manner—you'll be able to earn buy-in from even the most skeptical stakeholders.
Data are the common language of the bottom line and difficult to dispute when presented in terms of how they are affecting your organization directly. The key to winning over the skeptics is finding a way to make one person reviewing numbers look like a team of analysts who spend 40 hours a week crunching data. The best place to start is by building a sustainable scorecard that's general enough to be applicable in all scenarios but detailed enough to make trends easily identifiable.
Solutions
The scorecard begins with pulling all the relevant raw data for everyone in your organization. That includes names, departments, employee levels (part time or full time; differentiate levels of full-time employment if your company is organized as such), birth date, new hire date, and whether employees engage with voluntary or additional talent development opportunities outside of mandatory offerings such as service training or compliance. All that information should be obtainable via export from your company's HR information system or HR management system.
Once you've collected all the information, place it into a single Excel worksheet. I recommend that you add the following columns and enter a few simple formulas to establish your foundation using the commonly used Excel commands:
- Today's date: =TODAY()
- Days between two cells: =DAYS(x,y)
- Sum a column: =SUM(x?:x?)
- Average a column: =AVERAGE(x?:x?)
- Count items in a column: =COUNTA(x?:x?)
- Count keywords in a column: =COUNTIF(x?:x?,"keyword").
To filter the data, highlight an entire row on your worksheet, select Data from the toolbar, and then select the filter icon. That enables you to sort individual columns by specific information contained within that column.
Now that you've laid the concrete in your foundation, it's time to add your walls and build out the secondary worksheets that enable you to segment your measurements by department and to track turnover throughout the year. The most exciting part about this is that you've already done the work. Activate your departmental filters and then copy and paste the information to build individual department subpages. This step enables you to easily measure departments against each other and the organization overall. As for tracking turnover, simply cut the former employee's information from the raw data page and insert it into the turnover worksheet.
With the heavy lifting done, you're able to formally build a scorecard that will highlight and compare the differences between employees who engage with talent development and those who don't. Much like the way a roof completes the look of a home under construction, the scorecard paints an image, making sense of the data collected. From here on out, you'll want to start incorporating your understanding of your company, who the stakeholders are, what's most valuable to them, and what it is you are trying to accomplish.
If corporate tenure and turnover carries the most weight with stakeholders, set up your scorecard to include:
- overall corporate tenure and turnover
- departmental tenure and turnover for employees engaged in talent development
- departmental tenure and turnover for employees not >engaged in talent development
- tenure statistics based on your assigned categories
- other pertinent tables, such as employee or department engagement comparisons and generational breakdowns.
While each individual table provides insight, it's not until you look at all the insights congruently that you will begin to see your impact. A great first step, for instance, is to compare departmental tenure with departmental talent development engagement levels. If employee development truly adds to engagement, then departments boasting the highest level of engagement should feature the lengthiest average tenures. Although you can't definitively state that talent development was the sole cause of these connections, if you identify enough logical comparisons consistently over time, your statements gain greater credibility.
The scorecard also helps to debunk any anomalies. In comparing departmental tenure and engagement, for example, let's say you notice a department that had a 75 percent engagement rate, with the department having an average tenure for nonengaged employees seven years longer than engaged employees. In a department's subpage, you can review demographics and learn that there are two nonengaged workers who have been with the company 20 years longer than anyone else on their team. Despite three out of four employees being engaged, these two employees have skewed your results.
From here, the scorecard enables you to demonstrate its impact on the future of your organization and its culture. Compare information you uncovered from your research and look for correlations between it and other data sets such as corporate engagement scores, managerial feedback, or any other available employee feedback. Employee retention demands an understanding of what motivates and drives the company's workers.
Using this scorecard in connection to any and all employee engagement information will often set you up for a more strategic approach to your practice. If you're looking to provide cost savings and you see a higher level of turnover than desired, review the mandatory programs your team offers via a vendor. If there's an opportunity to internally produce a program that replaces a costly alternative, you'll not only save money, but you'll be able to build a program that incorporates your organization's culture directly.
If tenure within certain teams is lower than average, and this corresponds with a group of more inexperienced or less effective managers, there's the justification for pitching a new or updated managerial development program. By investing time in developing a detailed scorecard, you'll go beyond instincts to organization-specific information that can't be refuted.
Resources Used
Data that an organization already has, exported to an Excel spreadsheet and organized in such a way to see trends and correlations.
Time Saved
Because you don't have to start from square one with gathering data, you will save countless hours. Make the spreadsheet do the work and make your team look like a hard-working group of data experts.
Reduced Costs
You will realize costs savings by internally producing programs that are more relevant to staff and, thus, see reduced attrition and increased productivity from more engaged employees.
(Td.org)
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