Helping HR to measure up: arming the ‘‘soft’’ function with hard metrics Kate Feather Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this article is to highlight the more strategic role HR departments can play in their organizations. By prioritizing the measurement strategy in organizations, HR leaders can demonstrate to leadership the impact employees have on the business and how an investment in internal processes and programs can boost engagement – and ultimately business results. Design/methodology/approach – This paper outlines a four-step process for effective employee engagement measurement: use behavioral and emotional outcomes; correlate employee engagement survey results to meaningful outcomes; focus improvement efforts and investments on the high impact/low performing areas; and re-measure to assess success. A series of de-identified examples from PeopleMetrics clients illustrate the importance of following each step in the process. Findings – By measuring employee engagement, tying the results to other HR and business metrics and using the findings to target improvement efforts, organizations are demonstrating to leadership the impact employees have on the business and how an investment in internal processes and programs can boost engagement – and ultimately business results. As more organizations recognize the value of using rigorous metrics to evaluate and optimize their workforces, the HR function will benefit because it will be serving a more strategic function than it has traditionally been associated with in the past. Research limitations/implications – These findings are based on the fieldwork experience of PeopleMetrics. Originality/value – The paper provides a very useful perspective for HR managers to consider, particularly within organizations with extensive measurement systems. Keywords Employee development, Human resource management, Human resource management research Paper type Case study Introduction HR professionals looking to overcome the view that HR is a ‘‘soft’’ function for which there are few hard metrics should focus on employee engagement as a measurement that can be linked to other HR and business metrics and deliver improved business results. Kate Feather, a director at PeopleMetrics, outlines the path to effective measurement and demonstrates the theory in practice in a range of organizations. Successful businesses function around a set of core metrics supporting the view that what gets measured gets managed. For a long time metrics such as revenue, costs, profits, units shipped and defects have been closely monitored, analyzed and researched. During this time, however, HR was dubbed a ‘‘soft’’ function, with the typical view being that people and metrics do not mix. While HR has always known the value of its role, the problem has been in quantifying return on investment for senior management. Today, there is little doubt in the board room that people make a difference to business ...

1. Helping HR to measure up: arming the
‘‘soft’’ function with hard metrics
Kate Feather
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to highlight the more
strategic role HR departments can play in
their organizations. By prioritizing the measurement strategy in
organizations, HR leaders can
demonstrate to leadership the impact employees have on the
business and how an investment in
internal processes and programs can boost engagement – and
ultimately business results.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper outlines a four-step
process for effective employee
engagement measurement: use behavioral and emotional
outcomes; correlate employee engagement
survey results to meaningful outcomes; focus improvement
efforts and investments on the high
impact/low performing areas; and re-measure to assess success.
A series of de-identified examples
from PeopleMetrics clients illustrate the importance of

2. following each step in the process.
Findings – By measuring employee engagement, tying the
results to other HR and business metrics
and using the findings to target improvement efforts,
organizations are demonstrating to leadership the
impact employees have on the business and how an investment
in internal processes and programs can
boost engagement – and ultimately business results. As more
organizations recognize the value of
using rigorous metrics to evaluate and optimize their
workforces, the HR function will benefit because it
will be serving a more strategic function than it has
traditionally been associated with in the past.
Research limitations/implications – These findings are based on
the fieldwork experience of
PeopleMetrics.
Originality/value – The paper provides a very useful perspective
for HR managers to consider,
particularly within organizations with extensive measurement
systems.
Keywords Employee development, Human resource
management,
Human resource management research
Paper type Case study

3. Introduction
HR professionals looking to overcome the view that HR is a
‘‘soft’’ function for which there are
few hard metrics should focus on employee engagement as a
measurement that can be
linked to other HR and business metrics and deliver improved
business results. Kate
Feather, a director at PeopleMetrics, outlines the path to
effective measurement and
demonstrates the theory in practice in a range of organizations.
Successful businesses function around a set of core metrics
supporting the view that what
gets measured gets managed. For a long time metrics such as
revenue, costs, profits, units
shipped and defects have been closely monitored, analyzed and
researched. During this
time, however, HR was dubbed a ‘‘soft’’ function, with the
typical view being that people and
metrics do not mix. While HR has always known the value of its
role, the problem has been in
quantifying return on investment for senior management.
Today, there is little doubt in the board room that people make a
difference to business

4. success; they are often labeled the company’s greatest asset.
Whether you are a
service-based business that generates revenue through talent
that has the ability to create a
PAGE 28 j STRATEGIC HR REVIEW j VOL. 7 NO. 1 2008, pp.
28-33, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1475-4398
DOI 10.1108/14754390810847531
Kate Feather is based at
PeopleMetrics,
Philadelphia, PA, USA.
loyal customer base or a manufacturing-based business that
relies on talent to create,
process or distribute products, it is the people in the
organization that contribute to your
growth, success, or failure.
Many companies struggle to measure these assets in a
meaningful way, however. The key
questions HR professionals are being asked are: How can we
effectively measure the impact
of people on our business? How do we know that our
investments in people are paying off?

5. Identifying what to measure
Faced with these questions, HR needs to in turn ask itself what
it should be measuring. It is
tempting to collect data on a myriad of measures, such as
headcount, staff turnover,
absence, accidents, error rates, training hours/spend per
employee, customers per
employee, diversity targets, productivity and so on. While these
are indeed valuable, without
a measurement framework they can turn into an exercise in
measurement for measurement’s
sake. Too many disparate measures without a unifying concept
can dilute the message and
potentially position HR as offering tactical, low value add
information to business leaders.
By focusing measurement on employee engagement, tying the
results to other HR and
business metrics and using the findings to target improvement
efforts, some organizations
are demonstrating to leadership the impact employees have on
the business and how an
investment in internal processes and programs can boost
engagement and ultimately
business results.

6. The path to effective measurement
There are four steps to ensuring such HR measurement
programs are robust and capture
senior leaders’ attention:
1. Measure employee engagement using behavioral and
emotional outcomes.
2. Correlate employee engagement survey results to meaningful
outcomes.
3. Focus improvement efforts and investments on the high
impact/low performing areas.
4. Re-measure to assess success.
Step 1: measure employee engagement using behavioral and
emotional outcomes
There are many definitions of employee engagement. Some
organizations refer to
engagement as job satisfaction, others talk in terms of loyalty
and, still others, in terms of
advocacy or positive word of mouth. Recent research has
revealed that engagement is a
combination of both functional and emotional behaviors and
attitudes (PeopleMetrics,
2007). Without creating an emotional link with employees,
organizations are unable to

7. sustain high levels of engagement and, ultimately, performance.
Specifically, an engaged employee is positive on the following
items:
B Retention. Desire to stay with the organization.
B Effort. Motivation to give more than is required.
B Advocacy. Mindset to actively recommend the company as a
great place to work.
B Passion. Feeling an emotional connection, even ‘‘love,’’ for
the organization.
‘‘ Too many disparate measures without a unifying concept can
dilute the message and potentially position HR as offering
tactical, low value add information to business leaders. ’’
VOL. 7 NO. 1 2008 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWj PAGE 29
Based upon recent research by PeopleMetrics involving more
than 5,000 employees of
companies ranging in size from 50 to 100,000 þ employees, the
outcomes of retention,
effort, advocacy and passion are highly correlated with business
outcomes. Specifically, the
findings revealed that:
B Fortune 500 companies in the lowest quartile with regard to

8. company profits had 50
percent fewer engaged employees than those in the top quartile.
B When it comes to individual performance, high performing
employees were twice as
engaged as their low performing counterparts.
Step 2: correlate employee engagement survey results to
meaningful outcomes
The first and critical step in proving the impact people assets
have on the business is to
identify the business or people outcomes that are most valuable
to the organization. These
will vary by organization but should be easily identified through
a review of business
strategy. Two examples are discussed below.
Global brewery links engagement to sales performance. This
organization was most
concerned with the productivity of its sales function. In order to
get the attention of senior
leaders, the HR department of this large, global brewery set out
to prove the relationship
between an engaged sales force and the number of barrels of
beer sold in a given period.
Sales teams were divided according to levels of engagement

9. (high, medium and low) and
year-to-date sales were identified for each engagement
grouping. This showed that as
engagement increases so does the sales performance of each
team. In fact, the difference
in year-to-date sales (measured by the number of barrels of beer
sold) between the sales
teams with the lowest and highest engagement scores was
90,000. The value of this to the
organization was easily calculated and an argument for focusing
on people and HR
investments was made and supported by leadership.
Proving the causal tie between employee engagement and
volume of calls handled in a UK
call center. A government-based organization in the UK was
undergoing significant
organizational change. It set out to understand the relationship
between call center
employee engagement and the number of calls that were being
answered at the call center
level – a key indicator of productivity for this organization. The
hypothesis was that as
employee engagement increased so would the number of calls
answered.

10. One of the questions frequently raised by business and HR
leadership is: what comes first,
engagement or business results? To address this question for
this particular client,
employee engagement and calls answered were measured at two
separate points in time.
Time 1 (T1) offered a baseline measure and time 2 (T2), which
occurred 12 months later,
offered the opportunity to see how employee engagement and
volume of calls answered
shifted over time after interventions to address engagement
were introduced. Figure 1
clearly demonstrates that as engagement increased between T1
and T2, so did the volume
of calls answered. Specifically, by increasing engagement an
average of 12 percentage
points, the average percent of calls answered increased by five
points in the same period.
Step 3: focus improvement efforts and investments on the high
impact yet low performing areas
Successful adherence to steps 1 and 2 will result in the ability
to demonstrate the link
between people assets and business performance for an
organization. The next step is to

11. show how the efforts undertaken by HR to improve employee
engagement are paying off.
Without this evidence, it is hard to secure support and funding
for future interventions.
The most effective way to do this is to identify the key drivers
of employee engagement and
work on improvement efforts in these areas. Key drivers are
those areas in an employee
survey that are found to have the highest impact on levels of
engagement through the
application of regression analysis. This is an important nuance
for HR to understand and
communicate to the business. Low scoring, weak areas are not
necessarily the areas that will
drive desired behaviors from employees. There is a tendency in
many organizations to
identify the lowest scoring items on an employee survey and
make these central to any future
PAGE 30jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWj VOL. 7 NO. 1 2008
interventions. This is not advised; instead it is critical to
understand the most important
drivers of employee engagement.

12. Frequently, employees give low scores to parts of the work
experience that will not make or
break their commitment and engagement levels. Compensation
is often an example of this.
Very rarely does compensation receive high scores but likewise
rarely is it found to drive
employee engagement. By using statistical techniques that
derive the importance of various
aspects of the employment relationship, organizations are much
better equipped to make
decisions that will positively impact engagement and business
results. Thus, a best practice
approach is to identify the high impact yet low scoring areas
and focus efforts for
improvement on these areas – bearing in mind, of course, ease
of implementation and
alignment with other business and HR initiatives in the
decision-making process. Two
examples are discussed below.
Hospital system finds a culture of caring is the heart of its
engagement strategy. The
organization in question is a large hospital system located in
New England with 11,400

13. employees and 2,519 physicians. The hospital understands the
importance of employee
engagement as a driver of staff retention and patient quality
outcomes. The mission of the
HR function in this hospital system is to assist the hospitals and
their partners in achieving
their goals of being the employer and provider of choice in the
communities the hospitals
serve.
The organization takes a holistic approach to measuring and
improving employee
engagement. The executive vice president of HR has said that
one of the most critical
aspects of its measurement system is to ensure that HR and
business leaders are not
‘‘bumping around in the dark’’ with regard to their people
strategy. By surveying employees
on a biennial basis to identify the key drivers and then
conducting regular pulse checks in
between to ensure efforts are reaping the desired results, the
system has been able to
capture clarity and focus with regard to the ‘‘make a
difference’’ areas.
This organization learned that the highest impact/lowest scoring

14. driver of engagement,
consistently across all hospitals and the corporate functions,
was ‘‘the hospital/division
cares about its people.’’ Having learned this, each group was
tasked with developing and
executing its own action plan to impact positive perceptions in
this area. Table I outlines
actions taken by one hospital and the corporate group to
positively affect views of a ‘‘caring’’
culture. A discussion of the impact of these efforts is contained
in step 4.
Regional bank finds reward, recognition and a culture of service
excellence matter most to
employee engagement. One regional bank in the US first
measured employee engagement
in 2006. At that time, the data revealed that employee
engagement has a strong, significant
impact on customer perceptions and behaviors. This analysis put
employee engagement
Figure 1 Engagement between T1 and T2
VOL. 7 NO. 1 2008 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWj PAGE 31
squarely on the agenda for the senior leadership team. The bank

15. made a commitment to
improve engagement levels by focusing on the top three drivers
of engagement revealed
through the 2006 survey. These were:
1. A commitment to delivering exceptional service as evidenced
through scores related to
‘‘excellent service is rewarded and recognized here.’’
2. Rewarding and recognizing employees’ contributions.
3. Feeling fairly compensated.
Furthermore, there was evidence that employee engagement
levels were being pulled down
by retention scores and the bank had experienced some turnover
in key positions.
Employees also mentioned in the survey that they perceived a
lack of commitment from
leadership with regard to the retention of top talent.
Over a 12-month period, the bank developed and implemented a
series of initiatives aimed
at increasing employee experiences and perceptions in these
core areas. Specifically, the
organization determined that the first two drivers could be
worked on together. A set of

16. clearly defined service standards (internal and external) was
rolled out and a recognition
program based around employees’ performance on these
standards was launched.
Employees are nominated for quarterly awards based upon their
behaviors and results in
line with these customer service standards.
A thorough review of pay bands was also carried out, following
which a new more
competitive pay scale was introduced for all employees. In
addition, employees in
professional positions were offered new deferred bonus and
stock appreciation plans.
Following a year of intensive effort a follow-up pulse survey
was administered to gauge
effectiveness of the initiatives deployed and determine the
impact on employee
engagement.
Step 4: re-measure to assess success
The final step along the measurement path is re-measurement.
Pulse checks or census
surveys can be carried out to measure changes in employee
perceptions around the areas

17. that have been worked on. This will prove to leadership the
value of the work undertaken in
driving a high performing organization. Returning to two of our
previous examples, the
following results were found.
Hospital system learns that focus on caring pays off. Having
worked diligently to improve
perceptions of caring during a 12-month period, the hospital
system conducted a pulse
survey with a random sample of employees. The survey was
designed to measure change in
Table I Actions taken to positively affect views of a caring
culture in a hospital system
Hospital A Corporate group
Enhanced caring through:
management visibility plan;
development of pay practices that demonstrate fairness and
respect;
consistency of application policy; and
management training
Improved caring through rewards and recognition initiatives:
team to evaluate current rewards and recognition (led by COO);
and
communication and education regarding compensation and
benefit package to staff
Caring through career development:

18. HR staff available for career development/counseling; and
improved communication to internal candidates for open
positions
Increased caring through enhanced communications:
joint meetings of directors and managers;
bulletin boards installed on each floor of the building with
events
and job listings;
employee forums with the CEO;
corporate newsletter to highlight a corporate department each
month;
regular e-mail communication to employees listing actions
taken in
response to issues raised in the survey;
employee suggestions solicited in workshops, brown bag lunch
sessions, etc.
PAGE 32jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWj VOL. 7 NO. 1 2008
employee engagement and views of the key drivers. Engagement
increased by 10 and 8
points in a 12-month period for the hospital and corporate
groups. Favorable views of the
caring element also increased by five and nine percentage
points, respectively.
Regional bank’s efforts to improve areas that make a difference
result in significant positive
change. Looking again at the regional banking example, a pulse
survey among all

19. employees but including only questions to measure employee
engagement and views of the
key drivers was carried out 12 months after the initial baseline.
The results showed that
significant improvement was made during this timeframe,
providing evidence that focusing
on the top areas shown to drive employee engagement results in
real improvements.
Specifically:
B Overall engagement with the company increased by five
percentage points.
B Employees’ views of how employees are rewarded and
recognized for excellent service
increased by 17 percentage points.
B Perceptions of fair compensation increased by nine
percentage points.
B Leadership’s commitment to retaining top talent improved by
12 percentage points.
B Overall views of contributions being rewarded and recognized
improved by five
percentage points.
In conclusion

20. Effective measurement is an essential skill for HR professionals
to master if the HR function is
to firmly position itself as a strategic function w ith a ‘‘place at
the table.’’ Yet, many
organizations still believe that HR is in the business of ‘‘soft
and fluffy,’’ un-quantifiable
metrics. Thus, determining a measurement approach that is
focused on proving the link
between human capital and business results, as well as the
relationship between HR
interventions and people performance, is a powerful strategy by
which HR can change the
way it works and the value it is perceived to create.
Reference
PeopleMetrics (2007), ‘‘PeopleMetrics’ self-funded research
into employee engagement’’, Philadelphia,
PA, January.
About the author
Kate Feather is director of people engagement practice at
PeopleMetrics. She has over 15
years’ professional experience in customer and employee
research. She was previously a
senior consultant at Hewitt Associates. Kate Feather can be
contacted at:
[email protected]

21. VOL. 7 NO. 1 2008 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWj PAGE 33
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PSY-358 Adult Development and Aging
Topic 3 – Physical Changes during Adulthood
Directions: This assignment will require you to type directly in
this worksheet. For Part I, you will describe 3-4 key physical
changes that generally take place within each system during that
particular age range. 75 word per box should suffice, and bullet
points are preferred over long sentences. An example is
included in RED. Note- not all age ranges will experience
significant changes, and some boxes will overlap.
A minimum of three expert sources are required, which can
include your textbook. Expert information must be correctly
cited within each box.
After completing your research for the chart, answer the follow -
up questions in Part II. Use properly formatted APA in-text
citations, including full references at the bottom of the chart.
Part I: General Physical Changes
Age Range
Sensory System
Reproductive System
Cardiovascular System
Musculoskeletal system
(e.g. bones, joints)
Digestion and Metabolism
Appearance

22. Emerging Adulthood through Early Adulthood
(17-25-ish)
Example:
List some significant changes with some of these:
· Vision
· Hearing
· Taste
· Touch
Early Adulthood
through Middle Adulthood
(25-45-ish)
Middle Adulthood
through late adulthood
(45-ish through death)
·
Part II: Follow-up Questions

23. In 150-250 words (for all 4 questions), please answer the
following questions:
· At what age-range do we see the most dramatic changes
occurring?
· Choose (and explain how) at least two factors that might
exacerbate the physical changes. Examples: Excessive sun
exposure
· What can be done to offset some of these physical changes
(cho0se one change above and include both preventive and
accommodating ideas). Example: You might explain the impact
of proper nutrition
· What was your biggest take-away from this activity? What
changes might you make now?
References:
Full APA references belong here
Four lessons learned in how to use human resource analytics to
improve the ...