One of the benefits of HR software is the control and visibility it gives you over your people data. But among hundreds, if not thousands, of people metrics available, what should your HR systems report on? Here are 24 metrics we typically see C-suites asking for most.
Even the most seasoned HR analytics whizz can find it overwhelming to extract and analyse the most relevant metrics from their HR software. Maybe you’re reporting on one set of data for the board each month, and another for your senior leaders each week… with some ad hoc reports for line managers thrown in. That’s a lot of reports to wrangle, and, potentially, hundreds of data points within your H R software to analyse on a regular basis.
With all this potential in front of you, it’s easy to be paralysed by the possibilities.
The right HR software – one that’s designed with intuitive analytics in mind – will simplify the stats and coach you through the process of building and compiling useful management reports.
Let’s get started. We’ll give a quick overview on using HR data for decision-making. And then dive into the HR metrics we often see C-suite leaders asking HR teams for – first the fundamentals, then more sophisticated reports that power advanced modelling and forecasting.
Jump to:
- How to use HR data for decision-making
- 12 key HR analytics for business leaders
- Go further with the 12 best HR metrics for C-suite leaders
- Become a true partner to the C suite with Ciphr analytics
How to use HR data for decision-making
Like we’ve mentioned, it can be tricky to know where to start with using HR data for decision-making. Let’s start simple – with your HR software.
You need to be confident that your software captures all the necessary HR data in one place. And that the data is up to date and accurate. That might mean that your HR software needs to integrate with other systems – such as payroll, benefits, or your LMS – so you have a joined-up view of your data.
Next: does your HR software have an in-built analytics tool? If it does, it’s probably much easier to work with that rather than export data to Excel and analyse it manually. If you have a sophisticated HR system like Ciphr, which has a brilliant in-built data tool – Ciphr analytics – then you’ve hit the jackpot. Because, with Ciphr analytics, you have pre-built, intuitive dashboards
Once you have the right systems in place, it’s time to get comfortable with data. Make friends with your finance team (or a data analyst ) and get them to show you the ropes. The only way to get used to working with data is to put the effort in, and a coach – in the form of a data-savvy colleague – will help you succeed faster. But don’t panic if you don’t have a friendly data analyst to help you. If you’re using a tool, like Ciphr analytics, which comes with pre-configured dashboards, you’ll be able to see and analyse the most crucial metrics straight away.
So you’ve got the right tools, and you’re used to interrogating data. Let’s move on to look at the key metrics you should monitor.
12 key HR analytics for business leaders
1. Headcount
HR software should make headcount reporting super simple and fast, especially if you’re using cloud-based software that’s easily managed and updated.
Granular, up-to-date headcount data helps the C-suite understand the organisation’s size, growth rate, and capacity to scale. It can also inform decisions around budgeting and resource allocation, which has a major impact on the bottom line.
2. Compliance reporting
HR software should help ensure compliance with employment laws and regulations including GDPR compliance. Your C-suite might want a top-line overview, to check the organisation is keeping on the right side of the law (avoiding costly penalties and reputation damage).
3. Turnover rate
High staff turnover is expensive and can hurt morale and productivity. HR teams can track their overall turnover rate either month-by-month or annually, which includes all leavers including those who are dismissed, made redundant, or retire.
The C-suite often also wants a separate figure for voluntary turnover, which is typically most disruptive and often indicates the presence of underlying problems such as low engagement, a poor culture, bad managers, or unsatisfactory reward packages. Knowing the difference between voluntary and involuntary (sometimes called ‘regrettable’) turnover, can help inform better planning and pre-empt bigger issues.
Like headcount, this data is most useful when it’s segmented. HR software can typically offer turnover data by department, seniority, and location, giving HR a nuanced idea where to investigate and stem problems.
When you look at your turnover rate, consider benchmarking it against country and sector-specific rates. 2024 data from the CIPD found that the average turnover rate for UK workers is 34%. This varies widely between sector, dropping to as low as 25% in public administration and defence, to as high as 52% in hospitality.
4. Retention rate
The C-suite usually also expects retention rate reporting. Your software should make it easy to show segmented data here so you can spot patterns and trends, and act accordingly.
A good retention rate typically correlates positively to culture and employee engagement. Strong retention rates will reduce recruitment and onboarding costs because you’re not backfilling as many roles. Bear in mind, though, that there will always be a natural turnover of employees (see above), so a turnover rate of 0% is neither desirable nor realistic.
5. Absence rate
This measures the percentage of employees who are absent from work. It matters to the C-suite because absenteeism is expensive, disruptive, and damages productivity. High absence rate ultimately hurts total workforce efficiency, revenue, and business performance.
Spotting changes (particularly signs of upwards trends, or in specific teams) early can be a crucial early warning sign for attrition or burnout. Getting to grips with your absence management helps you minimise disruption.
Enjoy out-of-the-box absence dashboards with Ciphr analytics
6. Total compensation cost and cost-per-employee
For most organisations, the workforce is your biggest line item so cost reporting here is crucial to understanding organisational performance. The C-suite need to know total compensation costs, which calculates the total direct and indirect costs associated with an employee, like:
- Salary
- Overtime
- Benefits
- Bonus
- Commission
- Incentives
- Stock options
- Equity
- Taxes
- Training and development investment
- HR investment
- Recruitment investment
- Facilities and equipment costs
Cost-per-employee then divides total compensation costs by the number of employees. This metric helps identify areas of overspending and spot possible efficiencies.
7. Overtime hours and overtime costs
This is a metric your C-suite is likely to care about because understanding overtime costs are instrumental to understanding routes to growth.
For example: if your business takes on a new client that calls for an extra 30 hours per week to service, how much would this cost in overtime?
On a related note, the C-suite will also likely want to know current overtime hours. This shows opportunities for cost efficiencies and highlights whether the current workforce have capacity to work extra overtime if needed. High volumes of overtime, for sustained periods of time, might be a precursor to rising absence or staff turnover, so keep an eye on this metric.
8. Cost-per-hire
Of all the talent acquisition metrics, this is likely the one your C-suite cares most about. Taking the example above: how much would it cost to hire a new full-time employee to service the new client, and how does that stack up against overtime costs?
9. Time-to-fill
This is another headline recruitment metric that matters to top-level strategic business decision-making. Time-to-fill indicates how long it’ll take to grow the workforce.
If the organisation is about to win a new contract that requires staffing, when do we need to go to market? How much will overtime cost us before we ramp to full capacity?
At the more sophisticated level, HR data management software might also break down time-to-fill by role, level, and internal versus external hiring. Armed with insights like these, leaders could decide to prioritise building an internal management training programme, say, over hiring external management talent.
10. HR operating costs and HR cost-per-employee
As much as C-suite leaders need to understand the workforce, they also need to understand the people who manage the workforce. The most common metrics the C-suite usually expect human resource management software to report are total HR operating costs and HR cost-per-employee.
These metrics showcase HR’s efficiency, allow benchmarking, and empower tracking over time to spot changes that need attention. They’re also a powerful way to prove HR’s value to the business and earn credibility.
11. Workforce representation
As equality and diversity in the workplace and inclusion continue to be big priorities, the C-suite will typically expect HR to showcase metrics around diversity reporting.
Look for HR software that shows workforce composition by characteristics like gender, age, and ethnicity, at least. Many HR systems also allow you to report on a broader range of metrics than this, provided you’ve collected that data – like education background, for example.
Drill down into DEI data – without compromising on data security
12. Training uptake and engagement
Effective L&D programmes are well-known to increase productivity, so it’s little wonder the C-suite cares about training.
A fundamental metric is often training uptake, which shows whether employees are completing courses. This has an implication for compliance, and there’s an assumption that greater training uptake translates into better skilled, more engaged employees.
Depending on whether your HR software has integrated LMS functionality, the C-suite could also expect reports on learner engagement.
Go further with the 12 best HR metrics for C-suite leaders
The metrics we’ve just covered are some fundamental metrics most C-suites expect their HR teams to have a grasp on – but there’s a mountain of important data beyond this that can improve forecasting, modelling, and decision-making.
1. Workforce productivity
Productivity is fundamental to business growth so this is usually a big priority, but productivity can be complex to measure. How do you quantify a productive software developer versus a productive content manager, for example?
Depending on its sophistication and on your organisation’s setup, your software might measure productivity in various ways, like:
- Performance metrics like project completion or sales figures
- Customer satisfaction ratings or net promoter scores (NPS)
- Attendance rates
- Time-tracking
- Training and development completion
Good HR software can help with this process, either through core reporting functionality or through robust third-party integrations.
2. New hire failure rate
Up to 20% of new hires leave within their first 45-days, and a third leave within six months. This can be enormously costly and disruptive, and a major drain on productivity and performance.
HR software can typically report on this through core functionality, integrated employee onboarding software, or via third-party integrations to the onboarding software you already use.
3. Time-to-productivity
If your HR software has good reporting functionality, you should be able to easily report on time-to-productivity. This is an invaluable metric because it contributes to employee lifetime value, helps ensure new starters add value faster, and allows more accurate performance projections and headcount planning.
4. Cost of turnover
This metric goes a step further than looking at turnover, to quantify the issue in financial terms. This helps HR galvanise executive buy-in for initiatives to reduce turnover and improve the employee experience.
Turnover costs are complicated to calculate, though, because they draw on data that’s normally housed in different systems (such as recruitment, onboarding and performance management software).
Choosing integrated HR software means you can connect all these people-related systems into a single source of data, to make complex calculations like this easier and less manual.
5. Granular diversity and inclusion reporting
Workforce representation is fundamental but good HRt software can also report on diversity and inclusion in more depth.
For instance, that could mean tracking the representation of different groups at various seniority levels, understanding employee perceptions around inclusion, and tracking your gender pay gap at different levels and across departments.
Many organisations find this intimidating, but the right HR software makes gender pay gap reporting simple.
6. People function effectiveness
As HR reporting gets more sophisticated, C-suite leaders typically see more value from ‘how effective is it?’ reports than just ‘how much does it cost?’ reports. These tend to be more sophisticated calculations combining and comparing data sets.
For instance, your software might empower you to calculate recruitment return on investment (ROI), by evaluating employee lifetime value divided by total hiring and retention costs per employee.
The C-suite will likely care most about key ROI metrics, like:
- Recruitment ROI
- L&D ROI
- HR ROI
- Payroll ROI
- Onboarding ROI
7. Ratio of high-performing employees
This shows leaders what proportion of the workforce are classified as high performers, contributing most to the organisation’s success. A high ratio of top performers speaks to great end-to-end people functions, building a workforce that can deliver excellent results.
Understanding this helps leaders identify whether the organisation has the capabilities to grow, innovate, or pivot into different areas.
8. Revenue-per-employee
This divides revenue by number of employees to show how much revenue each employee generates. This gives the C-suite insight into the organisation’s revenue-generating potential to support growth planning. If we added 10% more headcount, for example, how much revenue would that contribute?
This information can inform more accurate resource allocation, performance evaluation, budget planning, forecasting, and competitor benchmarking. For example, if your commercial partnership team has a lower than average revenue-per-employee, you might re-evaluate how resources are allocated to support this team.
9. Workforce efficiency
A common counterpart to revenue-per-employee, workforce efficiency also evaluates the organisation’s productivity but considers output versus input. That is, it looks at how efficiently employees produce quality work given the resources available.
Depending how work happens across your organisation, a workforce efficiency calculation might consider various data points, like:
- Performance ratings
- Output per employee
- Time to completion
- Cost per work unit
- Capacity utilisation
- Quality of work
- Cycle time
- Cost-per-employee
- Time and attendance
- Workforce productivity
10. Employee lifetime value
Employee lifetime value, or ELV, measures employees’ long-term contribution to the organisation. This helps C-suite leaders understand the value of each employee, which can inform employee development, talent management, retention, and succession planning.
For example, you could improve ELV by decreasing time-to-productivity, so new hires add more value, faster. Or you could increase ELV by improving retention, so employees add value for longer.
The basic calculation is total annual revenue divided by employees, multiplied by average tenure. But, with more data, you can incorporate multi-faceted and segmented data points to improve accuracy and fuel better decisions (like calculating a more accurate ELV for senior sales reps versus junior data entry clerks, for example).
11. Employee engagement and eNPS
Employee engagement has been decisively connected to an array of positive HR and organisation outcomes. In fact, Gallup has found that organisations with more engaged employees are 23% more profitable than their peers. For most C-suite execs, this makes engagement and the employee net promoter score (eNPS) an important priority.
Look for HR software that can track employee engagement or can integrate seamlessly to third-party engagement tools.
12. Succession planning reporting
With the right HR systems, you can conduct sophisticated planning and analysis to build future readiness. Succession planning metrics are often a holy grail for HR and business leaders because of the strategic importance of having the right senior leadership.
Succession planning reporting will include metrics like:
- Bench strength
- Succession readiness
- Employee career progression rate
- Promotions per year
- Time-to-promotion
- Internal hiring for senior positions rate
- Time-to-fill critical roles
- Leadership development ROI
Become a true partner to the C-suite with Ciphr analytics
Your HR software holds a great deal of data — the key ingredient for decision making. But to make great decisions, you need to tell great stories. And our HR analytics functionality is here to help you do just that.
Our absence, holiday, organisation, and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) analytics dashboards have a variety of customisable filters and datasets. You can easily extract specific reports at the click of a button or explore the pre-configured dashboards containing key measures.
Download our factsheet to discover more. Or book a demo to see our tech in action straight away.
This article was first published in August 2023. It was updated in April 2025 for freshness, clarity and accuracy.