A lot of people wrongly believe that HR management should be applied in those industries, which mainly depend on the productivity and skillfulness of employees. The truth is, however, that this particular kind of management is highly popular in totally atomized businesses as well. As far as we live in the era of the advanced information technologies, the issue of hiring educated and responsible people remains one of the main concerns of business owners today.
Despite of the fact that IT industry generally involves highly functional software and special machines that perform all basic tasks, it is still the company’s workforce that develops IT utilities, programs and solutions. Therefore, managers of such organizations should not underestimate the importance of implementing human resource metrics, which may effectively help identify the level of skillfulness and productivity of their employees. The Balanced Scorecard system is the most powerful tool that may successfully contribute to personnel assessment and management. Furthermore, it does not only help evaluate the work of the company’s HR department, but enables business owners find reasonable ways to improve its performance as well.
So, how does this system work? HR Balanced Scorecard makes it easy to design special strategy charts, which represent the connection between the most important indicators and categories of this system with regard to the company’s specialization. It concerns the human resource department as well. As a rule, this system incorporates 4 basic categories, namely customer, financial, learning and professional growth as well as inner business processes. Each separate category, in its turn, involves a number of significant KPIs (key performance indicators) that represent the most influential factors critical for the particular kind of business.
When it comes to evaluating the HR performance within the IT industry, the most powerful KPIs are the average cost of equipment and that of the office area for one employee. Let us have a closer look at these indicators. As far as the cost of equipment is concerned, it seems important to underline that all utensils, computers and services applied by IT companies are quite expensive. Consequently, implementation of HR KPIs proves to be a reasonable solution, since it makes it possible to optimize the company’s financial expenditures, thus economizing money for other potentially important purposes.
The same is about the second indicator mentioned above. Though a lot of IT professionals consider it more convenient to work directly from their houses, many programmers still decide to work in the company’s offices. If applied correctly, HR KPIs may effectively help optimize the expenses for each employee with regard to the occupied office space, thus saving money, which may be further used for the implementation and development of coaching and training techniques for the company’s workforce. These are the most reasonable factors that speak in favor of BSC implementation.