HR Benchmarking Resource Pack:
Key tools, sources and techniques
This taster pack of HR benchmarking resources is brought to you by XpertHR – the leading online information source for all your HR requirements.
In the current climate of severe economic instability and organisational belt-tightening, benchmarking HR processes is an essential way to control costs and ensure that you are achieving best practice as efficiently as possible. XpertHR’s benchmarking service makes it easy to measure and monitor employment practices among UK employers in both public and private sectors. It provides key metrics in the main categories required for effective HR benchmarking, including pay and benefits, absence and leave, and recruitment and retention.
The service features more than 500 survey questions across all the main benchmarking categories, and new questions are added regularly. It is based predominantly on survey data collected and compiled by the expert IRS research and writing team.

Key features of XpertHR’s benchmarking service:
❯ Benchmark your company’s employment practices, policies and performance
❯ Measure, monitor and match best practice
❯ Download results for use in your own reports
❯ Benefit from four decades of HR benchmarking expertise

This resource pack covers

For more information or to request a demonstration ❯ a review of the benefits of HR benchmarking

Call 020 8652 4653 (quote “benchmarking”)
Email enquiries@xperthr.co.uk
Go to XpertHR’s book a demo form

Extracts from benchmarking surveys on:
❯ absence rates and costs
❯ redundancy rates
❯ pay prospects
❯ labour turnover rates and costs

www.xperthr.co.uk/hr-benchmarking/

The benefits of HR benchmarking
We take a look at the various ways of benchmarking the HR function: measuring and comparing HR processes to improve performance.
Benchmarking HR activities and processes is common practice and its popularity is growing, fuelled by increasing demands on the HR function from senior executives to demonstrate that it adds value and for HR to become more strategic. The scope of HR benchmarking ranges from measuring performance against industry standards to comparing processes, functions and culture to help understand how successful organisations achieve key people management objectives. The most commonly benchmarked HR activities are pay and benefits, absence and labour turnover.

Levels of sophistication
Benchmarking can take place at three levels of sophistication:
❯ performance benchmarking: compares hard data;
❯ process benchmarking: examines the underlying causes for superior performance; and
❯ strategic benchmarking: looks at less tangible factors – such as leadership and the management of change – that drive successful organisations.

Comparative data
Almost any activity can be the subject of a benchmarking exercise. Common areas for benchmarking the HR function or people-related factors include: absence rates; productivity measures; resignation rates; managerial and professional ratios; HR department costs per full-time employee; levels of commitment and engagement; training costs; number of days’ training per trainer; revenue and profit per employee; recruitment costs per recruit; staff suggestion rate; and time spent on recruitment.
Benchmarking begins with gathering data, whether or not the process is confined to comparing hard data or is the start of a much more extensive comparison or examination of performance. Key metrics will consist of ratios, rates and time taken for a task, for example. Any organisation wanting to benchmark needs to have in place effective internal data-gathering mechanisms.
Some exponents of benchmarking would generally not class simply comparing numerical data as benchmarking. Rather, it is the beginning of a much bigger process to understand how superior performance is achieved. Nonetheless, comparing hard data will highlight problem areas and is a useful first step in any benchmarking exercise.

The next step