Workforce Score Card

1-What does it take to be successful in determining the return on investment (ROI) of HR proposals?

It partially depends on the expert judgments of HR and line managers. They need to help you develop the numbers to calculate the probability of success or failure for particular investments. You can use colleagues, focus groups, or other techniques to gather feedback on potential cost and benefit categories and ask of help in generating dollar-value estimates for each of the categories that you have developed. Some of these data may be available from your HR information system. You need to make sure you have developed the cost categories before you develop the cost estimates.

2-Here's an example of what I mean. If you ask your top HR person how much they invest in training per year on a per-employee basis, they could probably derive a number from the corporate training budget. However, if the firm is very large, there may well be a substantial quantity of training that is done at other levels, say, division or business-unit, which investments would not be tracked by corporate HR. Line managers perform a lot of on-the-job-training that is not tracked by the corporate or divisional financial accounting statements. Thus, for many firms, the corporate budget for training and development can understate the true spending on training, by a lot. Thus, you must frame your question carefully (e.g., Do we want to know the return on "corporates" investment in training or the organization-wide investment in training?) before we begin to collect the actual cost data. Thoughts?

Let's assume that senior managers need to adopt a new perspective on the strategic potential of their compensation and benefits plans.

3-Can your plan develop, implement, and evaluate compensation policies/programs and pay structures based upon internal equity and external market conditions that support the organization's strategic goals, objectives, and values?