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Auditing Human Resources
Using the Scaled Comparison
The Scaled Comparison asks a person filling out a questionnaire to compare two HR activities using the following format:
Question:
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Which Human Resource work adds more value to achieving the company's business objectives? |
| Effectively manage benefit costs |
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Ensure pay reflects individual performance |
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In the actual questionnaire, the respondent is presented with a full page of such pairs rather than a single pair. Each activity is paired with each of the others a number of times. As many as 40-60 different statements of HR work can be studied in a single page of decisions.
Importance of HR Activities
The first question asks about the importance of the HR activities to the accomplishment of business objectives. As much as HR professionals love all of the work they do, there is no other standard against which their work will be evaluated.
Question:
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Which Human Resource work adds more value to achieving the company's business objectives? |
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Performance of HR Activities
The second question asks the person completing the questionnaire to indicate which of the various activities HR is performing better than the other. This will prioritize all activities with the one being delivered the best at the top of the list.
Although some of the issues in the second example are different that the issues in the first, both questions display the same list and each activity appears multiple times on each page.
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Which work is Human Resources currently doing better? |
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The Reports
Ideally, the work that is most important to the accomplishment of business objectives should also be the task being performed the best. The Profile allows you to clearly analyze the "gap" between the Importance of the activity and how well the HR area is delivering it.
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The next illustration shows the same data in slightly different format. Although there are strong statistical data supporting these reports, experience has shown that survey results are most useful when they require little numerical or statistical understanding in order to interpret them.
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As is common with many such surveys, important differences exist in different parts of the organization, among workers and managers with very different perspectives. The analysis of Subgroups shows these differences, so decision-makers can know how HR work is perceived in various parts of the company.
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Underlying all of the reports shown above is the actual Scaled Comparison score, a true interval index, and supported by actual reliability assessment with each report. You never have to rely on assurances of reliability or studies conducted in some other time and place. You will know the reliability of your results.
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The examples shown here pertain to the evaluation of HR work performance. Any staff group, whose output is absent concrete measures of performance, could be audited in the same way. All staff functions provide a service to the larger organization, which receives the "service" as its "customers". This evaluation tool uses that perspective to perform a sensitive and accurate assessment of the quality of service from staff areas.
How do I get more information?
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