Last week Andrew Carter and I attended the CIPD annual conference - #ACE2022.   Taking time out of the office for this sort of thing does feel a bit like a treat - time to catch up, re-group, think about the future.  Time also to hear about what the commentators think will be important over the next year.  Time to wonder what the future will bring. 

I've been to a few of these things over the years and always heard something that makes me sit up and take notice.  This time, I nearly cheered!  If it had been a smaller audience I might well have reached across and shook Peter Cheese's hand.  As it was, I never got the opportunity to chat with him in person.

What, you may ask, did he say that was so important?  Just this - we need to get better at measuring things in HR, we need to do more quantitative and qualitative measuring.  We need to start finding robust ways to prove our initiatives work.  Oh flip yes! 

How do we do that?  Well in my view we find out what the business needs to know about the outcomes of what we do, and work out ways to present it to them.  Easy to say but not quite so easy to do.  So I have a question - what is the one HR measure that your business couldn't do without and how easy is it to do?  For example: is it attrition, or recruitment costs/time, salary costs, headcount, training costs, which are all fairly obvious and very important, and I'd love to hear about the non-standard measures you use as well.  Tell me what makes your Exec sit up and take notice.

Of course, its never easy, but we do have a solution to measuring your capability management projects - if you want to know more, take a quick look here.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLMQYu8EQb8