To make a dashboard effective, you must thoroughly understand the needs of your internal users. Different roles within the organisation have different needs.

Some examples:

• CEO: Needs an overview of strategic HR data such as turnover rates, diversity statistics and costs per employee. This supports long-term planning and business strategy.
• HR manager: Focuses more on operational data and more detailed information, such as retention rates, absenteeism and employee engagement results. This helps optimise HR processes.
• Team leader: Uses dashboards for tactical insights, for example to monitor and improve performance and productivity within their teams.

By involving stakeholders from the very start of the development of an HR dashboard through interviews or workshops, you can prioritise information needs. Personalised dashboards ensure better usability and adoption.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) form an important foundation of an HR dashboard. Choosing the right KPIs starts with linking the goals of the HR dashboard to the organisational goals. After all, it remains crucial that HR supports the organisational objectives. A useful approach is to answer the following three questions:

1. What is the business strategy of the organisation? A selection of KPIs that contribute to achieving the business strategy can be a way to shape the dashboard. If customer satisfaction is a strategic objective, KPIs such as customer satisfaction scores (for example through Net Promoter Score) or customer retention rate can be included. For organisations that have cost optimisation as a strategic objective, a KPI such as cost per hire or time to fill can be useful.
2. Who uses the data and why? Select KPIs that help users take immediate action. The possible target groups listed above, together with the corresponding examples, can serve as inspiration.
3. What is the impact of this KPI on the organisation? Ensure that the selected KPIs contribute to a measurable improvement in business results. When focusing on business results, KPIs such as revenue per employee, profit margin per product line and customer satisfaction score can be used.

By monitoring these KPIs, the organisation can make strategic decisions regarding product adjustments, customer service improvements and workforce strategies to improve the company's overall performance.

Large numbers of KPIs can lead to information overload. Therefore, limit yourself to the most relevant metrics.

A third important parameter for building an HR dashboard is the various HR processes and their impact. This provides insight into the effectiveness of the processes and helps identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies. Below are a few examples:

• Recruitment process: Measuring efficiency in attracting new employees can be monitored through KPIs such as time to hire, cost per hire and quality of hire. These KPIs not only help evaluate the speed and cost of the recruitment process, but also measure the effectiveness of attracting suitable candidates.
• Onboarding: The onboarding of new employees is crucial to their success and engagement. KPIs that can be used to measure the effectiveness of the onboarding process include time to productivity and onboarding satisfaction score. This helps to understand whether new employees can quickly adapt to the organisational culture and their role, and whether the onboarding process can be optimised for better results.
• Performance management: KPIs in this process can help monitor and improve employee performance. For example, percentage of completed performance reviews, employee satisfaction and percentage of employees with a development plan can provide important insights into the effectiveness of performance management. This helps organisations ensure continuous growth and improvement of employees, which contributes to the overall business strategy.

By visualising these processes, you can immediately see where optimisation is needed and where processes are running well. This helps HR teams take targeted improvement actions and increase the efficiency of HR strategies.

A final important parameter for building an HR dashboard is segmenting HR data based on specific demographic or organisational factors. This approach makes it possible to gain deeper insights into trends that may not be visible in the overall data view.

Segmentation helps to take targeted actions and gain insight into differences between groups within the organisation.

• Departments: Compare the performance of different departments, for example in terms of turnover, productivity and engagement. This provides insight into which departments may require additional attention.
• Job levels: Analyse the performance of employees at different job levels. This makes it clear where more focus is needed, for example among junior employees or at higher job levels where employees may be dissatisfied.

This approach makes it possible to focus HR efforts on specific groups that behave differently from the broader organisation, leading to more targeted improvements.

Designing an HR dashboard that adds value to decision-making requires a thoughtful approach. These four factors can help build an HR dashboard that is both operationally and strategically valuable, depending on the specific needs of the organisation.

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