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Hi, hey, hellooo,

First Monday of the last month of Q1, how are we feeling???

It’s like I blinked and this quarter flew by, am I closer to accomplishing any of my goals? TBD I'll circle back end if Q1. Here’s to hoping.

The world is in some wild times but one thing is for certain that someone in corporate America will be circling back about those goals and KPIs by the end of the month. Ooof.

✨ Here are some things to bring you some joy: ✨

🎧 The newest ep of the I Hate it Here pod. My former direct report Morgan Stanely (yes, that’s really her name) joins me to talk about what it was like to be managed by me then taking over my old job. There’s a lotttt to unpack in this episode, you won’t want to miss this one.

📺 It’s MARCH MADNESS TIME!!!! On March 31st we’re embracing my fave time, march madness, and HR Therapy will be alllll about your no B.S. hiring playbook so you don’t go home in the first round. Get it???? I hope to see you there!!!

Now, onto today. It’s the quarter of NEW so we’re continuing that vibe by talking about metrics we should be focused on!

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NEW

Is your people data even relevant?

TBH: I feel like most of the standard HR metrics are no longer relevant for work today.

The metrics that became standard in our toolkit like engagement scores, turnover rates, time-to-hire, eNPS were designed for a different era of work.

In that era of work we were trying to understand: are employees showing up?

Now it feels like times are ch-ch-changing.

In this AI-dominated world the biggest question a lot of HR teams are trying to answer is: can our people and our orgs adapt fast enough?

And those standard metrics we've become so accustomed to weren’t really built to answer that.

The organizations that will win and stand out in the next decade aren't necessarily going to be the ones with the highest engagement scores…

They're going to be the organizations who figured out HOW their people actually work.

Like how decisions get made, how knowledge moves, how fast people grow and build their people strategy around those factors.

So how do you figure out those things?

By thinking about and measuring different things!

I’m going to share 3 things to consider measuring to help prepare your employees & org for the future:

Collaboration
Decision making
Learning velocity

Let’s dig in.

#1: Collaboration & connection

Every engagement survey I’ve ever seen (and launched) has questions about belonging, connection, or teamwork.

🙃 Employees give the questions a score on a scale of 1 to 5, HR ends up with some data that tells us how people felt about connection on one specific day and almost nothing about how collaboration actually functions on the other 364.

A score of 3.8 gets noted as "moderate." It probably goes into a deck to be presented at a meeting or maybe to the entire company. Potentially, a solution is presented for how that metric will be improved. But the reality for a lot of teams is that they try a few things, monitor the score over a few surveys and eventually just move on to the next fire. What’s missing is the understanding whether people are genuinely working together well or just trying to coexist in the same Slack channels.

Here’s the thing: a number tells you almost nothing about how your organization ACTUALLY functions.

Something that can: Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) maps the real, informal connections in your organization. Like who people actually go to for information, who the internal influencers are, where knowledge is siloed, and where collaboration is breaking down.

ONA gets to the core of the invisible network underneath work and what determines whether work actually gets done.

You may find out things like:

There are bottlenecks: 1 or 2 people that almost all work is routed through. Those 1 or 2 people aren’t just holding up work from getting done, they’re also possibly approaching burnout which could radically hurt your org.
There are islands: there are teams that are isolated from the rest of the organization due to the nature of their work and therefore their connection to their coworkers and the org is low.
Formal power is not relevant: those that hold big titles could hold little influence across the org.
There are brokers: There could be certain employees that bridge disconnected groups and create strings of connection throughout the org. That is wildly valuable but almost never noticed.

BTW: your engagement survey won't surface any of this. But potentially a network map will…

Historically collaboration has been treated as a “culture feeling” rather than a structural reality.

"We need to improve collaboration" ➡️ becomes a team-building offsite or icebreakers rather than discussing a structural intervention.

ONA reframes the question entirely. It's not about if "people like each other?" Rather, it's "how is information actually flowing, and where is it getting stuck?"

Sounds pretty impactful right?? Potentially more than reviewing an engagement score of 3.8…

How to get started: You don't need enterprise software to start.

A simple pulse survey asking employees two questions:

Who do you go to most for work-related advice?
Who do you go to most when you're stuck?

These two questions give you the raw data to start mapping informal networks.

➡️ From there, you can start to identify overloaded connectors before they leave, spot isolated teams before disengagement sets in, and make better decisions about team design and leadership development.

The goal isn't to survey how people work. It's to see what's actually happening so you can support it.

🔥 This is probably a bold take that I'll get roasted for someday but I think ONA could actually replace engagement as our gold standard metric. I think if you can map how the work gets done and THEN layer in engagement you can tell a bigger and better story of what’s happening in your org.

And in this AI-dominated world HOW work gets done will be very important to understand.

#2: Decision making quality

🤔 Think about how your organization evaluates managers right now.

What metrics are you thinking about?

Maybe its:

Engagement scores
Retention
360 feedback
Direct report performance against goals
The good/bad list HR keeps (I def have one!)

What’s missing??

Whether the manager actually makes good decisions.

Management is, at its core, a series of decisions. From who to hire, who to develop and promote to what to prioritize and when to escalate.

Most organizations have no systematic way of assessing whether those decisions are any good!!!

And if you had to ask the average HR team to rate their manager's decision making ability, what do you think they would say…

If I was a betting woman, I’d say not great.

We have some indicators to rate a manager’s decision making ability like if the team is hitting targets, the manager must be doing something right. Right??? We know, sometimes that's true. But… it also means we miss managers who are getting lucky, making short-term calls that will cost the org later, or whose teams are performing despite them, not because of them.

What a tangled web we weave.

📣 Take performance management as an example. We built performance management around outputs, like did the number go up? NOT the quality of thinking that produced something to go up. In stable environments, that's fine.

But most of us aren’t in stable times… We’re at light speed right now and in fast-moving ones times,, that measurement rewards the wrong things and misses the rot until it's toooo late.

I told you this was the quarter for new things, and I stand ten toes on business that performance management is not serving most (if not all) of us at work.

Okay, so how do we get started in measuring decision making ability?

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t happen overnight because you need some data.

Start with hiring as it's the most visible decision a manager makes. Build a simple post-hire review at the 6 and 12 months: does this person's performance reflect how they were assessed during interviews? Track it by the manager. Bonus if you layer in other interviewers feedback because that can also surface gaps.

Over time you'll be able to see some trends as to which managers actually know how to evaluate talent and who is operating on vibes. I know, I know - you already have your hunches but the data will reinforce that and make your case for intervention easier.

Over time, you can extend the same logic to other decision categories, not to punish managers for being wrong, but to make learning from decisions normal and visible.

Before you know it, you’ll have healthy dataset when it comes to making decisions. And an org that can make good decisions quickly could emerge as the front runner in the next few years.

#3: Learning velocity

"We have a strong learning culture."

Words I’ve uttered a few times in my career.

Now if you asked me to prove it, well that would be a bit more difficult.

And most organizations can't…

Here’s what the average org would point to:

Completion rates of courses
Learning tool utilization
How many employees have an IDP

What they can't tell you is whether anyone is actually growing… or whether that growth is keeping pace with how fast the work is changing. Remember: we’re in light speed times.

That's the difference between measuring learning inputs and learning velocity.

L&D has been historically measured on the former on things like courses completed, hours logged, certs received, rather than the latter: skills gained, behavior changed, capability built.

It's like measuring a hospital on surgeries performed rather than patient outcomes. Dr. Bailey would say absolutely not.

I mean is it any wonder that so much L&D spend produces so little measurable change??

So how do we take things from learning things → actual learning velocity???

⏱️ An easy place to start is new hire time-to-productivity.

Define what "fully productive" actually means for a role, not just "not making mistakes" but actually contributing at the level they were hired for and measure how long it takes. Track it by manager, team, and function.

📈 You'll see patterns fast: some managers onboard people in 60 days, others take six months, and almost nobody knows why.

➡️ From there, build a simple before-and-after skills assessment into your performance and development cycles.

It doesn't have to be sophisticated at all!!

Even asking managers "what can this person do now that they couldn't six months ago?" moves you from tracking participation to tracking growth.

What’s next:

Here's what makes this genuinely difficult: most of these metrics might require that HR have some harder conversation internally about what people data is actually for.

If it's for reporting like showing employees that engagement went up two points, then the old metrics are fine. You can defend them, benchmark them and easily present them.

But if people data is for making better decisions about how to design work, develop managers and leaders, and build an organization that can actually adapt at light speed, then the old metrics aren't going to cut it. They’re actually giving the illusion of insight while the real dynamics go unmeasured.

If you want to make better people decisions, retain the people worth retaining, and catch problems earlier than everyone else then it's time to measure new things that actually determine how the work in your org gets done.

I hope this edition gave you some food for thought when it comes to the metrics you’re looking at and focusing on.

Next week, in the spirit of new this quarter, I want to dive into new ways companies are thinking about their org charts. It’s a doozy.

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(HUMAN) RESOURCES

Iran conflict: where things stand
Oil prices increase
Love Story: the true story of CBK and JFKJR
Live Nation anti-trust trial kicks off
Stop guessing on benefits. It's already hard enough. Progyny has created the strategic framework you need*

*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

📚 What I’m reading: Wedding Dashers by Heather McBreen. One of my favorite booktokers talked about this author’s newest release (not this one) and said she loved her debut so I figured I’d test it out. I’m pleasantly surprised already!!!
📺 What I’m watching: Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. Oh boyyy, I watched every single season of ANTM. Religiously. My high school bestie and I still text about the show so when this documentary was announced I knew I would be sat. Looking back, the show did many many many questionable things. And the doc seemed to try to hold the cast accountable but to me missed the mark… If you watched, curious to hear what you think!!
📱What I’m popping off in the group text about: last weekend. Yeah, the events that transpired this past weekend were discussed in not 1, not 2 but MANY group texts.