The People Metrics a 100-Person Company Should Actually Track
Six numbers, each pointing at a specific part of the system. Not a dashboard project — a way of finding out what is failing before someone resigns.
People analytics arrives in most growing companies as a dashboard nobody opens. It has fourteen tiles, most of them headcount cut four ways, and it answers a question nobody asked.
A more useful starting point: a metric earns its place if a bad reading tells you which part of the organisation to go and look at. On that test, six numbers cover almost everything below three hundred people.
The six
| Metric | What a bad reading points at | Worth a conversation when |
|---|---|---|
| Rating distribution by manager | Calibration, or its absence | One manager’s distribution is visibly different from their peers’ and the work is comparable |
| Time in level, by level | Whether progression is real or theoretical | A level has people well past the typical time and no promotions out of it |
| Pay dispersion within level | Whether the pay framework survives contact with hiring | The spread inside a level starts to overlap the level above |
| Regretted attrition, by team and tenure | Management quality, more often than compensation | It concentrates in one team, or in the six-to-eighteen-month band |
| Time to productivity for new joiners | Onboarding, and role clarity before that | It is longer than a quarter, or nobody can say what it is |
| Span and layer count by function | Structure, and management load | A manager has more than nine reports, or a layer exists with spans of two |
Each one maps onto a specific part of how the company runs its people — the same parts a People Diagnostic examines. That is the point of the selection: the numbers are not there to be reported, they are there to tell you which part to examine.
Two of them deserve more explanation
Regretted attrition, not attrition
Total attrition is close to useless as a management signal, because it mixes together people you were sorry to lose, people you were not, and people who moved country. The number that matters is the first group, and it requires a judgement recorded at the time rather than reconstructed later.
Cut by tenure, it becomes diagnostic. Departures inside six months usually indicate a hiring or onboarding problem. Departures between six and eighteen months usually indicate a management problem: the person understood the job, and chose to leave anyway. That distinction is worth more than the headline rate.
Pay dispersion within level
Widening dispersion inside a level is the earliest visible sign that a pay framework is being eroded by hiring. It shows up long before anyone complains, because complaints only start once two people compare offers.
The reading that should worry you is overlap: when the top of one level extends past the bottom of the next. At that point the levels no longer explain the pay, which means salary bands are describing something other than how the company actually pays.
What to skip
Below three hundred people, several popular metrics cost more than they return.
- Engagement scores as a headline number. A single figure moving from 7.2 to 7.4 tells a leadership team nothing they can act on. The free-text answers underneath it are worth reading; the number is not worth reporting.
- Cost per hire. Real, and dominated by which roles you happened to open. It measures your hiring mix more than your hiring.
- Training hours. An input measure. It records that time was spent, not that anything changed.
- Nine-box talent grids. They assume a calibration discipline most companies this size do not yet have, and they produce confident-looking labels from unreliable inputs.
How often, and with whom
Quarterly, in the leadership meeting, on one page. Monthly is too frequent to show signal on any of these, and annual is too late to act on the ones that matter.
The review should take twenty minutes and produce at most one investigation. Six numbers that reliably generate one good question a quarter are worth considerably more than a dashboard that generates none.
Data does not fix anything. It tells you where to look, which is the part most companies are guessing at.
If none of these are currently measurable, that is itself the finding, and it is the one a People Diagnostic usually surfaces first.
Co-founder — Organisation & Operations
Francisco Campos
Built growing companies from the inside: first employee to COO at Onport through its acquisition by Farfetch.
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