It’s no secret that efficient case management makes it easier to deliver on your remit. The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) says that efficient case management is the key to consistent issue resolution, verifiable compliance and long-term employee satisfaction: An “investment”, with returns that include better retention, and the dataset needed to build robust HR strategies that deliver on your KPIs.
The question is, how are overworked HR managers supposed to ensure that their department’s case management is efficient? We’ve talked about the importance of robust processes before; looking at simple and effective ways to build a framework for improved efficiency in our blog post on optimising your use of case management software
We’ve also talked about the importance of investing in the right HR technology – and provided insight on the best way to address HR process reluctance in a follow-up blog post. So we wanted to use this opportunity to talk about metrics, or the importance of gathering the right data from your tools.
Put plainly, you can only improve the efficiency of a system if you understand it, and you can only understand a system if you have access to quantitative data that adequately describes its real-world performance.
Assuming that you're using a dedicated case management system, data probably isn’t a problem: Most modern tools are designed to collect and collate data on everything from average case duration or most common case type through to the average number of messages it takes to resolve a case or the percentage of cases that result in a compliance violation.
But having access to more data doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re developing a clear picture of your case management process – or analysing its real-world performance effectively.
Writing for Forbes, Professor of Data Analytics Joel Shapiro points out that the breadth and volume of data supplied by modern software solutions is often so overwhelming that it thwarts efforts to accurately measure the performance of a given system, and that’s definitely true here.
As an example, there’s often a temptation to hone in on a seemingly-vital statistic like average time to resolution, and use it as a barometer for success: Celebrating rises, and using a drop to galvanise a root and branch review of your process.
But if you’re putting your average time to resolution under the microscope - and ignoring other metrics that might help to contextualise or explain swings - you can end up blaming your own processes for a more fundamental problem, like a shift in the type and complexity of complaints received after a major change to working patterns.
At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve seen HR departments mire themselves in a web of contradictory data; trying to gather, analyse and rationalise every minute shift in employee sentiment, or time to resolution broken down by case type, department and/or handler that any useful insights are drowned out by noise.
Hard-won experience has taught us that threading the needle is key to success here: You need to gather enough data about the things that matter, filter out as much of the noise as you possibly can, and strive for a set of metrics that allows you to spot and resolve potential problems without sending you on a wild goose chase.
Get that right, and it’s a lot easier to make better decisions, improve your department’s productivity and (ultimately) deliver better outcomes for employees. Now, it’s necessary to point out that the right metrics will vary from industry to industry – and company to company. Where some organisations have the infrastructure and ethos required to diligently track and model NPS scores, others simply lack that ability and it’s important to filter all advice through your own understanding of your company’s capabilities.
But if we are focused on providing general advice on the most important metrics to track and analyse, we would recommend tracking metrics that allow you to understand
• Current case volumes and workload trends
• Case resolution rates
• Case resolution times
• Employee satisfaction
• Compliance
You’ll be on-track to develop an informed understanding of your case management process, and start making the changes needed to improve its efficiency.
This is foundational. Contrary to what you may read online, simply understanding how many cases are currently open and modelling your department’s workload trends won’t enable you to identify inefficiencies or spot bottlenecks because there’s too much context to consider.
As mentioned above, it’s hard to tell whether a sudden slowdown should be attributed to an increase in a certain type of case, the absence of your top handler or a wider shift in company culture – prompted by a slight shift in direction and focus.
But where tracking case volumes, and spikes in case volumes can help is in triggering the reviews that can begin to identify a cause. They’re ‘canary in the coalmine’ metrics, and they are useful in that they facilitate forecasting too:
If your tools show a big spike in cases after the summer holiday period, you can redeploy resources to better cope with next year’s demand, or begin working on a strategy to improve the way employees are managed back to work after taking extended leave. There’s a workload management angle here too: If you are tracking cases assigned per person, and marrying that data with some of the close rate data we talk about later in the article, you can start to model the potential for burnout and other useful insights that will keep your department healthy and functional.
In the round then, we think it’s quite useful for most HR departments to track the following metrics:
• Total number of cases opened per month/quarter/year
• The total number of cases assigned to each team member per month/quarter/year
• Cases broken down by type (e.g. grievances, performance issues, disciplinary actions, benefits inquiries)
• Case volumes over time
This should give you good top-down insight into how much pressure your department is under, where that pressure is coming from and how it’s being divided up amongst your team.
Case resolution rates are another blunt instrument, but they’re worth tracking because they are the first and most obvious measure of success, and the metric(s) most c-suite executives will want to talk about when reviewing your department’s effectiveness.
It’s important to stress that simply knowing you’re only reaching a satisfactory resolution on 60% of your cases doesn’t actually tell you anything meaningful in and of itself. But as with the case volume and trend-related metrics mentioned above, it can help to flag problems in their infancy, and trigger the in-depth review required to sniff out and resolve the issue.
As discussed in this article on navigating repeated pushback, there are a great many reasons that a case can drag on, and a low resolution rate may be more indicative of a problem with the complexity of your cases, rather than an issue with your department's case management processes.
Similarly, a 98% successful resolution rate doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone’s working at maximum efficiency, and that you can take your foot off the accelerator. Case resolution rate is widely considered a lag indicator, which means that it won’t start dropping until a serious problem with your process has become deeply rooted in your system.
But a sudden lift or improvement can be indicative that a change you’ve made to your case management process is starting to yield results, so it’s always worth tracking resolution rates and analysing them alongside other important data derived from improvement initiatives.
The key when gathering resolution rates is to be granular; looking at top-level, departmental figures, but also breaking success rates down by team member, month and case type so that you can drill down on what your data is trying to show you.
We generally recommend that companies track:
• The percentage of all cases resolved successfully
• The percentage of cases assigned to each staff member that were resolved successfully
• The percentages of each case type that were resolved successfully
• Resolution rates over time, to spot any emerging or historic trends
Resolving a case successfully is important, but if we are focused on improving efficiency and ensuring that our department delivers, we need to know that cases are being closed in good time too.
Case resolution times start to move us towards a place where we can accurately ascertain the cause of certain issues. For example, we talk about the merits of tracking case opens per employer above, but explain that simply knowing how many cases were assigned to someone doesn’t tell the whole story.
In some cases, understanding how long an overworked employee is taking to close the average case helps to shed some light on the impacts of overloading someone. It can also help you to understand whether someone is actually overworked, or just working more slowly; pointing to the need for further training, or at least enabling you to start asking the questions that will allow you to understand the requirement.
Finally, it gets you thinking about other factors: Is a specific, slow employee working slower because they have a higher share of the complex and sensitive cases? Has your whole department become dependent on a single problem-solver that’s now a bottleneck for cases raised by members of a specific department? Context is key, and while case resolution times don’t provide context, they do move us towards a place where we’re better equipped to start uncovering the truth.
There’s a compliance angle here too: in many industries, the time it takes to respond to an employee's complaint or question, resolve a workplace issue or ensure that proper structures are brought in to solve systemic problems is heavily regulated, which means that there’s a very tangible cost to taking too long.
To make sure you have a solid understanding of your case resolution times, we’d recommend tracking the following metrics:
• Average time to first response
• Average time to resolution
• Average time to resolution by case type and team member
Case resolution times and case resolution rates are key performance indicators for most HR departments, but it’s important to remember that your team is resolving cases for a very real, and much more human reason.
More often than not, the primary motivation for closing a case quickly is employee experience and satisfaction. In fact, experience tells us that most frontline HR case managers think that delivering a good resolution to members of the wider team is the single most important thing that they contribute by doing a good job and keeping up with all of their KPIs.
Ultimately, employee satisfaction is how managers are measured too – it’s less tangible and more subjective than a hard measure like case close rate, but upper management’s impression of your department will be based on the way they feel about your performance, and that will be primarily influenced by what they hear from their teams.
Of course, you can’t really measure employee satisfaction with HR processes unless you have a fairly robust process in place that allows you to send out surveys, poll staff members or gather more general feedback on how well they feel your team respond to and resolve complex or serious cases.
This is missing in a lot of smaller organisations, and even HR departments from larger companies have to work hard to get permission to use internal polling systems to collect information on the effectiveness of their case management process. But if you can get access, and start gathering insight into the wider team’s perception of your work, you can start building very focused and detail-oriented improvement initiatives that fix the things that really matter to your organisation.
Of course, the specific metrics you should track depend very much on the questions you’re allowed to ask and the way you’re able to gather feedback, but we would definitely recommend reading the AIHR’s guide to employee net promoter scores (eNPRs) as a starting point.
While it’s not the only way to measure employee sentiment, it does give some very valuable insights into the best way to gather and think about this sort of qualitative data – and how to use it to drive quality improvement.
No guide to useful HR case management metrics would be complete without a section on measuring compliance, but there’s also no need to get bogged down in fine detail here:
Important compliance metrics vary based on your industry or sector, and you’ll already know what you need to stay on top of in terms of case handling, documentation, response times and the type of actions you’re team have taken so it’s really just a case of ensuring that you are flagging and measuring violations properly – and analysing your data on a regular basis.
Our top-level recommendations are to ensure that you always track the:
• Number of compliance violations identified through case management
• Total cost of compliance violations
• Number of legal cases or complaints related to HR issues
So that you can spot and remedy any fundamental problems as quickly as possible.
Hopefully this article has helped to highlight important metrics and simplify your reporting workload, but there is one final thing to cover – namely the mechanics of collecting, analysing and reporting on all this data.
It goes without saying that collecting important data is much easier if you are using a dedicated case management system. Yes, we’re biased, but it is undeniably more difficult to accurately track important metrics if you are manually compiling data from several different spreadsheets. Good HR case management software also has dedicated reporting functionality that’ll pull out the data connected to your key metrics, and graph it for you – simplifying the reporting process and making it much easier to spot those all-important insights.
But when it comes to actually using those insights to drive fundamental changes to your department or processes, things become much more complicated. Rather than try to precis an incredibly dense and involve topic in the last paragraph of this blog post, we’ll point you towards resources that have helped to shape our thinking:
• GE Event’s article on the rise of data driven decision making in human resource management, available here.
• Acia Learning’s short course on enhancing decision making with data-driven
insights, available here.
• Business.com’s in-depth article on how to utilise big data for human
resources, available here.