HR Dashboards: Examples, key metrics, and best practices

People and HR departments are seeing an accelerated shift to data-driven models of running, managing, and reporting on their activities. There’s a rise in HR tech tools and a growing need to measure everything from turnover rate to employee wellbeing.  

But if all this data overwhelms you, and you’re not sure where to start, you might want to use HR dashboards as a neat way to gather, analyze, and present data.

What is an HR dashboard?  

HR dashboards are tools that allow People and HR teams to aggregate data and present it using visualization. These business intelligence tools help HR professionals get a birds-eye view of all critical metrics, keep an eye on patterns and trends, and build strategies to tackle concerns proactively.

HR dashboards also make it easy to present data to key stakeholders in a digestible, easy-to-understand way, which helps leaders understand behaviors, patterns, and HR goals better.

HR dashboard examples: 4 classics + 1 newbie

We’re not exaggerating when we say you can build dozens of different HR dashboards, but we’ve narrowed it down to 5 categories that are top-of-mind for HR managers.

Employee turnover dashboard

Employee turnover is one of the most critical HR metrics — a high turnover rate can indicate low employee engagement, dissatisfaction, and poor company culture.

HR professionals can use a dashboard to measure and monitor turnover-related data, such as:

 
• Turnover rate
 
• The avg. duration of employee tenure
 
• Breakdown of turnover per quarter, department, or seniority
 
• Voluntary vs. involuntary turnover
 
• Most common turnover reasons
 

With all this data available at a glance, you’ll be able to see patterns and negative trends and tackle their causes. For example, if your junior positions show a higher-than-usual turnover rate, it might indicate poor onboarding processes or a lack of training and management support.

This great dashboard by Lovelytics is a fantastic example 👇

Diversity dashboard

As DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) initiatives become one of the essential strategies for employee retention and acquisition, companies are upping their game by tracking and measuring their efforts.

Creating a diversity dashboard is a great way to do that — especially if it includes key data points like these:

 
• Workforce demographics (age, gender, ethnicity)
 
• Breakdown of employees by ethnic groups
 
• Breakdown of employees by gender
 
• Breakdown of tenure, avg. satisfaction and engagement, and earnings per ethnic group and/or gender
 

The folks at Qlik did a great job showcasing what a diversity dashboard can look like with the example below:

Employee performance dashboard

HR reporting in the performance domain is no longer about days spent at work, absenteeism, or cost vs. output. It now includes other essential metrics for companies and employees that give a more holistic picture of the employee’s performance and progress. Here are some metrics for your performance dashboard:  

 
• Soft skills like communication, teamwork, and alignment with company values
 
• Employee engagement and satisfaction rate
 
• Employee productivity
 
• Goals (and breakdown of the % of completion)
 
• Behavior rating
 

Lattice has great built-in performance dashboards as part of their platform that let People teams, managers, and employees stay on top of performance and always do their best work 👇

Recruitment dashboard

Talent acquisition is a critical metric for every industry and company: it’s usually cost-intensive, the success of the company often depends on its ability to attract the best people, and the recruiting processes can be long and draining.

The best HR dashboards include a recruiting section where all the key metrics can be seen at a glance:

 
• New hires vs total headcount on a quarterly or yearly level
 
• Recruiting and training costs for new employees
 
• Number of open positions by location, seniority, and department
 
• Candidate sources and their effectiveness
 
• Application sources
 

This great dashboard made with Tableau shows how comprehensive recruitment dashboards can be:

Distributed workplace dashboard

Now, the dashboards above were more or less classic — but this one is a newbie. Our workplaces have changed, and they now often include teams or individuals distributed across the US or the world.  

Whether your company provides offices or gives access to flex workspaces for people to meet and connect in person — chances are you now have a Workplace and People Operations strategy to manage that is complex, dispersed, and tough to track in a single place. On top of all that, HR systems don’t let you track and manage the distributed workplace, so you can’t see the number of employees using offices or flex spaces, let alone data that is more granular than that.  

With Gable’s dashboard, you get real-time insights into budget spending, space usage, collaborations facilitated, and employee satisfaction — all of which are important HR metrics (but also essential for the Workplace function).

Finally, Gable integrates with HRIS tools, so you’ll be able to sync your HR data, like departments, locations, etc., directly with Gable. This powerful dashboard lets you focus on providing employees with chances to spend their workday connecting while staying on top of trends and data at a glance.

  Stay on top of your distributed workplace and manage your strategy in one place. See how >>>  

Why use human resources dashboards

So, why use a dashboard if you can gather and present all this data by yourself? It boils down to three factors: time-saving, analytics, and easy monitoring.

In today’s workplace, HR teams are expected to manage and monitor everything from employee experience, performance, and engagement to attrition rates and turnover costs. Most of you will likely lack time to pull data manually and present it, even if it’s a quarterly task.

Data visualization doesn’t only help you with reporting — it also makes it easy for stakeholders to get insights they can immediately understand. This speeds up the decision-making processes and helps the company move faster on its way to achieving its key performance indicators.

Five key elements of good HR dashboards

When you’re getting started with HR analytics dashboards, keep in mind the essential features they should have to advance your reporting, monitoring, and data presentation:

 
• Able to pull from all your data sources. You want to pull data easily from any source you’re using: payroll platforms, recruiting tools, workplace management software, and your HRIS.
 
• Mobile friendly. Being able to access your HR data from a mobile device isn’t only handy, it’s a requirement in the modern workplace.
 
• Easy to use and share information. Using your dashboard should feel seamless, from comparing different time periods to sharing reports automatically with key stakeholders.
 
• Interactive and dynamic. The best HR dashboards let you zoom in on different dimensions of your data and analyze them in different ways and are collaborative, so you can work on the reports with your team.
 
• Offers augmented analytics. Ideally, your dashboard should be able to alert you when negative trends and patterns emerge, so you can act quickly.
 

Essential metrics and KPIs for HR analytics

Whether you opt for using one elaborate people analytics dashboard or several of them broken down by initiative, here are the basic HR KPIs and metrics we recommend every company keep track of:

 
• Employee count and type
 
• Demographic employee data
 
• The company’s turnover rate
 
• Average job tenure
 
• Employee engagement data
 
• Time to fill open positions
 
• Cost per hire and training cost
 
• Avg. and median salary by gender and age
 

Make the best of your HR data  

Use data to your advantage and stay one step ahead of what’s going on in your company, from high turnover to low employee engagement. And in today’s workplace, where People and HR teams work hand in hand with other departments like Workplace and Finance, collaborating on monitoring and reporting will help you achieve synergy, align efforts, and maximize the success of your People initiatives.