HR Dashboard: 5 Examples, Metrics and a How-To
The beauty of a car’s dashboard lies in its simplicity. It shows you the car’s current status in real time, and a little warning light allows you to take action when something’s wrong. The same concept applies to the HR dashboard, which reflects the status of your workforce.
An effective HR dashboard makes it easy for People Teams to gain insights into turnover rates, labor costs, and other workforce metrics. As such, it should be integral to any organization’s Human Resources Management practices.
In this article, we explore the intricacies of the HR dashboard. We compare it to the HR report, examine key functions and metrics, and discuss how to build an effective dashboard. We also share some examples. Let’s dive in!
Contents
What is an HR dashboard?
HR dashboard vs HR report
Key functions of an HR dashboard
HR dashboard metrics
Best HR dashboard tools
How to create an effective HR dashboard
HR reporting pitfalls to avoid
HR dashboard examples
Headcount dashboard in Excel: Template
FAQ
What is an HR dashboard?
An HR dashboard is a tool that provides HR teams with a visual overview of the most important HR metrics and KPIs in one place. It aggregates and displays information in a user-friendly format, often using graphs, charts, and tables. An HR dashboard gives an overview of the state of the workforce and it is key to strategic decision-making in HR.
HR dashboards typically include metrics related to recruitment, employee performance, turnover rates, absenteeism, training and development, employee engagement, and workforce diversity. Advanced dashboards may integrate real-time data and predictive analytics to forecast future HR needs or challenges.
HR teams can use various tools to create an HR dashboard, including Excel, Tableau, PowerBI, or their HRIS. Modern, interactive dashboards allow HR teams to gather and combine data from different HR and business systems and analyze this data without having to switch between tools.
HR dashboard vs. HR report
Both HR dashboards and HR reports focus on data and metrics to inform decision-making, but they differ significantly in terms of format, purpose, and functionality.
HR dashboards are highly visual, aiming to provide insights at a glance and enable ongoing monitoring of key metrics and trends. HR reports are typically text-heavy and often structured with tables and descriptive summaries. They’re intended for detailed analysis, documentation, and deeper explanations of data.
While HR dashboards are meant to be accessed for routine monitoring and decision-making, HR reports are often generated periodically (e.g., monthly, quarterly) for review or compliance purposes.
There are different types of HR reports, such as:
- Headcount reports
- Monthly HR reports
- Annual HR reports
- Turnover and retention reports
- Health and safety reports.
Both the HR dashboard and the HR report have their place in an HR strategy, allowing for high-level monitoring (dashboards) and detailed evaluation (reports).
For example, an HR dashboard might display a real-time view of employee turnover trends using an interactive chart that updates automatically. Meanwhile, an HR report might provide a detailed analysis of turnover data for the past quarter, including narrative insights and static tables.
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Whether you’re new to HR analytics or want to enhance your existing skills, this program will help you make a measurable impact in your organization.
Key functions of an HR dashboard
The HR dashboard plays a big part in enabling HR to track workforce data and report on it. The tool has several key functions, including:
- HR monitoring: Tracking key workforce metrics and regular reporting enables HR to keep a finger on the organization’s pulse. They can spot new trends and opportunities early on and address emerging problems before they significantly impact the business.
- Management information: An actively monitored and managed HR dashboard – and the reports that derive from it – can help managers do their jobs better. A well-structured and easily digestible report can inform managers about relevant team and department developments.
For example, suppose the customer support department struggles with high turnover and a high time to hire. In that case, managers will be more likely to emphasize retaining employees and be more aware of risks like longer replacement times when someone is about to leave. - Track problem areas: An HR dashboard is also a great way to track key problem areas transparently. Transparency in turnover rates per manager will encourage them to pay closer attention to retaining employees because their own reputation is on the line. By tracking areas of concern, HR can leverage its position to drive improvements.
- Strategic decision-making: Monitoring and analyzing data over time naturally gives HR teams insights into developing trends, budding issues, and more. This, in turn, allows them to make more strategic and data-driven decisions that align with the organization’s business goals and contribute to its success.
- Better communication: A well-designed HR dashboard that tracks data in real-time provides HR professionals with a wealth of information. The HR reports generated based on the dashboard data allow them to back up their ideas or initiatives with actual company data and hence improve their communication with the organization’s leadership and stakeholders.
HR dashboard metrics
A general HR dashboard should track metrics related to the workforce demographics and costs. Specialized dashboards might provide insights into specific areas like diversity, recruitment, and employee performance.
Here are some common metrics to showcase on an HR dashboard:
- Tenure: This metric measures the length of time employees stay with an organization. Tracking employee tenure can help identify trends in employee loyalty and engagement, and it provides valuable insights for workforce planning and retention strategies.
- Gender: A common distinction to drill into diversity data.
- Age: Age is becoming increasingly important in today’s multigenerational workforce. Age is also important for strategic workforce planning and succession planning, and it is often a key focus point for organizations that want to innovate and reorganize.
- Education level: Educational levels should only be included when available and when relevant to the organization’s overarching goals. Otherwise, they risk being a ‘vanity metric’ in the HR reporting.
- Function type: A metric like function type or function clusters might help to distinguish different groups within the company. Examples include top management, middle management, and individual contributors.
- FTE: A Full-Time Equivalent is the hours worked by one employee full-time. The number of FTEs is often lower than the number of total employees. This is especially true if there are many part-time workers present in the organization. FTE provides an accurate measure of the total workload in the organization. People who work less than 1 FTE can be considered part-time workers.
- Employees active: This metric represents the number of employees working at the organization.
- Turnover: This metric represents the number or percentage of employees who left in the previous period.
- New hires: This metric represents the number or percentage of new employees who joined the organization within the last year.
- Absenteeism rate: This metric represents the average percentage of time that employees were absent in the previous period. Another representation of this number is the total days of absence per employee.
- Cost of absence: This metric is not a standard one, but it can make the previously mentioned absence rate more tangible by relating it to a financial number.
- Cost of labor: Labor cost is the total amount that an organization pays to its workforce. This number includes employee benefits and payroll taxes. The cost of labor can be divided into direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are the labor costs associated with people who contribute to the primary process (an assembly line worker, for instance). Indirect costs cannot be traced back to a specific level of production (a security guard guarding the factory, for example).
- Training cost: Training cost represents the total amount a company spends on training new hires and the existing workforce.
- Recruitment cost: This is the total cost of recruitment efforts. Typically, it includes the costs of external agencies, job advertisements, and, sometimes, lost productivity. The cost of recruitment is much more complex, though, as it also involves elements like the cost of management time in selection and training. All these components help calculate the cost per hire.
- Time to fill: This metric refers to the number of days between a position opening up and a candidate accepting that position. It will vary significantly between job types: software developers, big data analysts, and highly qualified salespeople are much harder to find than entry-level marketers, for example.
Bear in mind that this is by no means an exhaustive list. The metrics you’ll track on your HR dashboard will depend on your organization’s specific goals, priorities, and challenges, as well as the dashboard’s audience.
For example, senior executives may prioritize high-level metrics like turnover rates, headcount trends, and workforce costs, while HR managers may focus on more operational metrics such as time to hire, training completion rates, and absenteeism.
Best HR dashboard tools
To get the most out of an HR dashboard, it is important to choose a tool that fits your organization’s needs and your current HR tech stack. Let’s take a look at some common HR dashboard tools and their advantages and drawbacks.
Excel
It is fairly easy to create a basic HR dashboard in Excel. You can use a pre-created HR dashboard template directly in Excel or create tables and charts with the relevant HR data yourself.
Benefits and drawbacks
The biggest benefit of using Excel for your HR dashboard is the fact that Excel is (relatively) familiar to many people and is usually readily available.
But Excel has drawbacks, too. Its visualization, collaboration, and real-time data management capacities are limited, for example. Spreadsheets also don’t offer the best data protection, which can lead to all sorts of security risks.
Tableau
Tableau’s HR dashboard software offers People Teams many ways to visualize their HR data, including motion charts, boxplots, pie charts, bullet charts, and more.
Benefits and drawbacks
The most obvious benefits of Tableau are its top-of-the-line data visualization features and, as a result, the fact that the software allows HR teams to showcase their data in a way that works for them.
The other side of this is that the platform is more complex, which means that you will likely need at least one person on the team who knows (or is willing to learn) how to work with Tableau.
Power BI
Microsoft’s Power BI is another tool that makes creating an HR dashboard and the subsequent aggregation, analysis, and visualization of data and reports very simple.
Benefits and drawbacks
Since Power BI is a Microsoft product, integration with other Microsoft products such as Excel, SharePoint, and Azure is easy. This can be an important benefit as many businesses work with Microsoft products. Other advantages include the fact that it’s easy to use, offers real-time data processing, and is secure.
As with any platform, there are also a couple of potential disadvantages of working with Power BI. The software is online-only, has limited customization options, and a rather steep learning curve for those who are unfamiliar with it.
Asana
Asana is a task and project management platform. Its dashboard capabilities enable People Teams to use pre-built dashboard templates or to create custom ones for their HR processes.
Benefits and drawbacks
Asana’s software offers some interesting collaboration features. HR stakeholders and others involved can engage in discussions, co-edit dashboards, and leave comments, making it a good option for People Teams that need a collaborative dashboard tool.
Disadvantages may include the fact that Asana doesn’t offer phone support and is relatively expensive.
HR tip
You might also want to look into dedicated HR dashboard platforms like Visier and Charthop. Such tools offer specialized features designed for HR needs, like advanced analytics, customizable reporting, and integration with existing HR systems.
How to create an effective HR dashboard
An HR dashboard is the most efficient way for HR teams to monitor, manage, track, and report on their HR KPIs (key performance indicators).
Here’s what to consider when creating an HR dashboard:
- Choose the right tool: The ideal tool for one organization might not be the right option for another. Factors to consider here include:
- The features you need (i.e., collaboration, visualization, etc.)
- Vendor support
- Whether the tool is easy to use or if you need a dedicated person who has experience with it
- The available budget.
- Select critical metrics for your dashboard: Here, too, the key metrics for your HR dashboard depend on what kind of dashboard you want to create; they won’t be the same for a recruitment dashboard and an employee performance dashboard, for example. If it is a ‘generic’ one, some of the HR dashboard metrics mentioned earlier in this article may be useful.
- Focus on user-friendliness: HR dashboards should be easy to maintain and use to ensure they deliver value to the organization without creating unnecessary complexity or administrative burden. Focus on providing quick access to key metrics without overwhelming users.
- Prioritize accuracy: HR reporting is often seen as a hygiene factor. This means that, like hygiene, solid and accurate reporting is taken for granted and not fully appreciated. Imagine you’re out for a meal in a restaurant. You’re not likely to comment on the restaurant being clean; this is something we simply expect. But, if you get dirty cutlery or the toilets are messy, you complain. To relate this to HR, reporting is not noticed much unless errors occur. Solid reporting, like cleanliness in a restaurant, is essential in maintaining credibility.
- Customize for stakeholders: If other stakeholders outside the HR department also require (regular) access to certain HR dashboards, you may want to involve them in the creation of those dashboards. What metrics do they believe are important, and how would they like to work with and use the dashboard?
HR reporting pitfalls to avoid
There are several pitfalls concerning HR reporting. It is important to address these, as doing so will prevent you from getting trapped in a never-ending reporting cycle.
- Avoid generating your reports manually: This is highly inefficient and will drain the capacity of your HR data department or person. See how you can automate your HR reporting, for example, by using HR software tools that integrate with your existing systems to pull and analyze data automatically.
- Don’t try to please everyone: If you can make 80% of the people happy with 20% of the information, that may be the best solution. Making an overly complicated dashboard and reporting on irrelevant data may lead to low engagement with the reports or dashboards and thus decrease their impact.
- Don’t ignore data errors: HR data will contain human errors. No matter how efficient your software, processes, and people are, there will be mistakes. When mistakes occur, fix them in the source systems. Make sure to create procedures to check accuracy when inputting data.
HR dashboard examples
HR dashboards come in different shapes and forms. Here are a couple of examples of HR dashboards in action.
General HR dashboard
This HR dashboard provides a snapshot of workforce data, highlighting headcount distribution by grade, hiring trends, and employee movement by year.
Key metrics such as top talent and performers, recruitment costs, and promotions are displayed, along with turnover breakdowns (regretted and non-regretted).
Sickness & absence HR dashboard
This HR metrics dashboard focuses on absence information, and the tab displayed in the image below revolves around sickness in particular. It visualizes the average number of sick days taken per employee over the past year and their cost.
Headcount dashboard in Excel
This Excel dashboard helps HR teams easily monitor workforce trends and patterns.
Recruitment dashboard
This recruitment dashboard example distinguishes between the company’s technical and non-technical hires. The dashboard provides real-time updates as we see the organization’s current hiring pipeline. It also includes the company’s top hiring sources for various departments.
General HRIS dashboard
This HRIS report is part of AIHR’s People Analytics Certificate Program, in which you can learn how to create this exact report by connecting multiple datasets using Power BI. The report is fully interactive.
If you’re new to Power BI, you can also watch this guide on using the tool to create interactive HR dashboards:
A final word
Whether it’s employee turnover, employee safety, or any other workforce-related topic, HR dashboards are a great way for People Teams and other stakeholders in the organization to get a picture of what’s going on. While they might take some time to set up, they can save countless hours in the long run by consolidating key data into one easily accessible place.
With clear visuals and real-time insights, dashboards help teams identify trends, address issues proactively, and make informed decisions. Plus, they foster transparency by ensuring everyone has the same understanding of workforce metrics.
FAQ
An HR dashboard is a tool that helps HR professionals visualize, track, evaluate, and report on their various HR metrics and KPIs. It is an integral part of HR management and key to making informed decisions.
It is relatively easy to make a basic HR dashboard in Excel. Create a Table (‘Insert,’ Table’) with the relevant HR data. Open a new worksheet and add slicers (‘insert,’ ‘Slicer’) for the HR metrics you want in your dashboard. Arrange the slicers to create your dashboard.
Depending on the tool you use, there are different ways to build an HR dashboard. Some tools have pre-built HR dashboard templates you can use and customize, for example. When creating an HR dashboard, it is good to keep in mind what metrics you want to include, its ease of use, and potential stakeholder requirements.
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