Webinar recap: The Journey of an HR Leader with 15Five’s HR Outcomes Dashboard

Modern HR is far more than just payroll and employee relations. With the shift to strategic HR, leaders are faced with the challenge of proving the impact of HR initiatives on key business outcomes such as performance, engagement, retention, and manager effectiveness. By rising to this challenge, HR leaders can demonstrate their team's value as a strategic profit center.

"How do I make space for the types of initiatives that we need to drive? If we do wanna increase performance and increase engagement at scale in our organization, how do I break free of the stigma around, “Oh, this is just HR work,” and, [instead, emphasize], “Hey, this is mission critical for us to be successful as an organization”?"

To achieve strategic progress and make a lasting impact on their organizations, HR leaders need to shift from a focus on activities to a focus on outcomes. In this portion of the webinar, Jeff introduced the concept of sand, pebbles, and rocks. Imagine you have a jar that you want to fill with various-sized objects—sand, pebbles, and rocks. Each represents different tasks you need to accomplish. With regard to HR...

• "Sand" is things like employee relations and issues with benefits.
• "Pebbles" are administrative tasks— the important work you're doing in your various programs.
• "Rocks" are the strategic measures you're taking to drive outcomes.

If you fill the jar with sand first, followed by pebbles, you'll run out of space for the rocks. However, if you start by placing the rocks in the jar, then add pebbles and allow the sand to fill the remaining gaps, everything fits in.  

Without this strategic shift, an organization will continue to be overwhelmed by sand. By prioritizing outcomes, you can achieve greater results and make a lasting difference in your organization. 15Five is here to provide the tools, education, and support necessary for HR leaders to make this shift and achieve better outcomes.

"How do we move from sand > pebbles > rocks, to this idea of rocks > pebbles > and sand? This shift, I believe, is the most important shift that an HR leader will ever make because the reality is: without this shift to focus on rocks first, your organization will just continue to pour sand into your jar."

To shift to strategic HR, you need to have the right data to...

• Inform decision-making,
• Track ongoing progress in real-time, and
• Connect that progress back to what matters most to the business.

...that's where we come in. 15Five's new HR Outcomes Dashboard gives HR leaders the ability to measure manager effectiveness, engagement, performance, and retention and see how outcomes compare to one another and change over time. Alongside the dashboard, our Manager Effectiveness Indicator (MEI) tool allows you to dive into how effective managers are— which is vital, given that managers are the top driver of engagement, performance, and retention within their teams.

"The Manager Effectiveness Indicator allows for [a] holistic understanding of how managers are affecting things like performance, engagement, and retention. So if you've selected your “rock” as performance, you can now look into, “Hey, here's some of the managers that are showing up with regard to performance on their teams. Here's how they're doing on these behaviors that we recommend and require managers to have. Here's how people perceive managers and how it all comes together.”

We know that the shift to strategic HR may seem daunting, which is why we suggest focusing on one outcome at a time. By aligning your efforts with a specific priority, such as performance, you can make a meaningful impact and drive real change. This approach allows you to concentrate your resources and attention on what matters most, ensuring that you're not spreading yourself and your team too thin.

"One of the questions that we get is, “How do we make space to do this?” I believe in what you're saying, and what I would encourage you all to think about is, “How can we start with one outcome?"