The real reason leaders distrust your numbers: how HR fixes it

Bring a turnover number to a leadership meeting and watch an executive wave it off, because a different figure reached them first. That is the moment HR loses the room. Alex Thompson, an implementation manager at HRBench who spent years as an HR practitioner and was once an HRBench customer, says the fix is not a sharper slide. It is one consistent source of truth leadership cannot second-guess.

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Why do executives stop trusting HR's numbers?

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Trust breaks when the same metric reaches leadership from several systems with different values. An executive hears through the grapevine that turnover is high, someone else cites a different number, and HR arrives with a third. Pulling every metric into one core system with one answer is what makes the figure defensible. Alex is blunt about the stakes: "the second a senior leader asks you a question about what's in what you're sharing with them and you don't have the answer, they lose truth or they lose faith in what you're sharing with them."

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Where does turnover actually hide?

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In the subsets, not the headline number. An overall turnover rate of 5% can hide one business unit at 2% and another at 7%. Alex treats each slice of the org as its own environment: "They each have their own kind of personality and environment that's going on inside them." Parse by manager, function, and business unit, and a spike often traces to one source, like a recruiter setting the wrong expectations for a role.

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Can you put data behind culture?

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Yes, the moment you run an engagement or eNPS survey. "as soon as you collect those surveys or engagement results, you do have a data point," Alex says. Pair that point with a hard metric and culture stops being purely anecdotal. One HRBench client tracks turnover by how far each employee lives from work, then layers engagement results on top to see whether commute sentiment is dragging on retention.

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Why do people stop answering your surveys?

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Because nothing happens after they hit submit. "employees take these surveys and then they don't see any impact from the org, any changes. They don't hear anything from their direct leaders around what they saw in the survey," Alex says. Fatigue is a response to silence, not to survey volume. Spacing surveys out helps, and so does cadence: a quarterly pulse lets you tie a number to the decisions made since the last one, where a weekly survey is "way too heavy."

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Should frontline workers be surveyed like the office?

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They should, and on the same instrument as everyone else. "They're still employees. They have the same benefits and are impacted by the business decisions in the same way," Alex says. Changing the survey between populations breaks the comparison. The real work is access: kiosks and handhelds on the floor, and time inside the shift so no one has to answer from home. The harder part is getting field supervisors to value the feedback and take "meaningful action," not retaliatory action, on what they hear.

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How does HR earn a seat in the room?

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By starting a quarterly business review, even a short one, even an email. Leadership is asking for the people picture next to the financials, and the bar to look valuable is lower than most HR leaders assume. "you'd be surprised how many times I've heard, I didn't know we had this information, or I didn't know we could produce this," Alex says. The seat goes to whoever brings the numbers first.

Alex Thompson (00:05): they're looking specifically at their turnover by individuals based off of how far they are from their working location.

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Logan (00:11): What goes into an implementation for an HRIS system?

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Alex Thompson (00:18): That's a loaded question, Logan. There's a lot that goes into.

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Alex Thompson (00:21): recruiters are recruiting individuals, but not giving them good expectations of a role. So you'll see high turnover.

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Logan (00:26): Welcome to another episode of Pulse, the show where we talk with HR leaders operating in high stakes environments, from M&A to board reporting and everything in between. I'm joined by Alex Thompson. He's been on both sides of the table, a SHRM certified HR practitioner who was once an HRBench customer and now serves as an implementation manager. Alex brings a rare mix of hands-on HRIS implementation experience, cross-industry consulting, and a deep understanding of what HR leaders face day to day. In this episode, we dive into how to build trust with executives using data, how to design eNPS and engagement surveys that drive action, and how to support frontline workforces. If you're in HR and looking to get better at managing up, delivering the right data in leadership meetings, or proving the ROI of your people strategy, this one's for you. Let's get into it.

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Logan (01:18): What goes into an implementation for an HRIS system?

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Alex Thompson (01:26): That's a loaded question, Logan. There's a lot that goes into.

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Logan (01:28): Is it? I didn't mean to have a loaded...

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Alex Thompson (01:33): So I guess that's a fair question. So the ground had kind of been set when I came on at UGI. They had SAP's core HRIS system in there. So they were tracking and storing their employee data as needed. But then when we go to look and implement these compensation modules or performance management, for example, there's a lot of work that needs to be done specific with those groups. So compensation's a lot more complex at its bones than I think the general employee is aware of, all the kind of science and evaluations that go into compensation metrics and benchmarking to produce those values.

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And it also works hand in hand with payroll, which gets complex. So the compensation system needs to be able to talk to the payroll system. So there's specific requirements that have to be accounted for in both. And then with performance management, a little bit more difficult, but less from a technical side and more from that qualitative side, getting your organization to kind of define what its performance management philosophy is going to be. How are we going to assess our employees? How often? What is the two-way feedback look like? So working hand in hand then with more kind of your performance HR folks and the talent management teams to understand what they need to get out of employees and what's going to be helpful to inform them and make better decisions down the road as we collect that information from employees. So again, really just getting everybody aligned and on the same page is half the battle sometimes. And then you have to bring the technology along to meet up with that.

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Logan (02:59): Okay, well, I promise this isn't a technical tool implementation show or episode. We wanna kind of get a little broader, a little into how to be a better HR professional. But a quick introduction, I'm speaking with Alex Thompson. Yes, he's with HRBench. He's our implementation manager, but he is a HR professional by trade and has a lot of knowledge, like he just mentioned, about his journey through. Alex, any other items you want the audience to know about you before we get started?

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Alex Thompson (03:34): Yeah, I mean, I'm based out of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania here. I've worked around the United States, but also done some time over in the UK working with some consulting contracts over there. So again, I've always been here around the Lancaster County area, but I've worked with companies all around the country. And it's been a great experience getting back to HRBench on the client serving side and making those connections and starting to kind of build out those relationships with our clients across the country.

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Logan (04:01): Great. Well, to kind of kick us off here, you talked a little bit about on the tool side, figuring out what your philosophies are around data, compensation, everything there. But I guess one of the places to start is if you have that philosophy within your HR team, how do you communicate that up the chain and kind of, I'm gonna say it in the managing up, because often HR professionals are teaching managers how to manage up, but now it's like, how do HR teams manage up to their executives for the stuff that they're doing?

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Alex Thompson (04:38): Yeah, so I think the biggest thing and the most fundamental piece of this is trust. So if your leadership doesn't trust what you're bringing to them, and that's a two-way street as well, they have to give you the trust to do the work that you want to do and trust that you're going to come with the right answers that they need. But I think that's fundamental in the managing up piece of work.

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I guess when we, if I was going to relate that to kind of a data piece and if we're informing our leadership on what the data points that they need to focus in on the org are, it's going to be consistency. And that's something that HRBench brings to the table. Found in the past when I would often go to a senior leader, they had preconceived opinions on things that may have been happening in the org or they heard through the grapevine about a specific metric that maybe at risk, let's say turnover high. But then they may have been informed by multiple individuals on that who all came from a different data source to bring them those assumptions. When you come back and you kind of piece things down into one core system with one answer, it gives you the ability to know what you're taking to them, that value's not changing based on different inputs, it's all getting the same inputs, so they know the numbers that they're looking at are reliable and consistent with what they've seen in the past.

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Something I always tell our clients when they're implementing is it's important to know what the pieces going into these metrics are, because the second a senior leader asks you a question about what's in what you're sharing with them and you don't have the answer, they lose truth or they lose faith in what you're sharing with them. So you need to be prepared to back up what you're bringing kind of with the nitty gritty that they may not see on a daily basis, but they know what goes into it. That's fair. Set. That help answer the question?

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Logan (06:23): Yeah, I guess the, so building trust, like, so I come from the marketing world and a lot of times marketing leaders have the same problem, so I always kind of identify with the HR function. Because there's like two sides of it. There's the data side and then there's like the anecdotal side. So in marketing it's always brand, but in HR, it's, you know, the employee feedback or running engagements or that kind of stuff. But really where I wanted to go with this was like, so you said build trust and hopefully an executive or somebody didn't get information elsewhere that gave them preconceived notion. Like do you have any tips that would help an HR leader or an HR practitioner start to build trust outside of just, I mean, consistency? Like maybe there's some kind of communication message or the way that you're communicating information to them.

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Alex Thompson (07:19): Yeah, certainly. And I think one way to do it is to get ahead of things. Think about what are the things those leaders need to be paying attention to. Tailor the data and bring them the important things so they're not hearing the noise of the day to day. It's very easy to pick up on something that you hear in passing that's important and then kind of form a direction that that's going to go. But if you're getting the things put in front of you that you need to see with the rigid data and the fundamental facts to back them up, it kind of focuses the leader's view into what's important and enables you to kind of work closer with them on that because they don't have the outside noise taking away from the initiatives that you're attempting to drive.

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Logan (07:58): Yeah. And then how do you, because in the managing up world, it's always super E or it the best way to do it is with hard data. But a lot of times, you know, in HR, and we're running with people, you know, employees, they're people. So it's not just data's and numbers. Like, how do you tell or communicate that story from the anecdotal, and that can be through surveys or things that you're hearing? Like, how do you pair the two together?

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Alex Thompson (08:32): Yeah. I think it's a good point and I'll touch on the surveys a bit, but then also kind of the, of course, I'm going to go back to data. It's been such a fundamental part of my career, but once you start to look into data at a lower level and you start to get a little bit more granular with it, I think that's when you can really piece out, and find the important and some of that kind of qualitative stuff from the data. So if you look at your organization as a whole, your organization is a being in itself, but then you have subsets of that organization, whether that be your functions, different work streams, different hierarchies, et cetera. They each have their own kind of personality and environment that's going on inside them.

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So when you start to group your data and parse it apart into smaller views, whether that be, again, manager or function, you can say, oh, here I'm seeing our overall turnover was 5%, but this business unit has 2% and the other has 7. What's happening in that one that's kind of getting us to that middle value, because it's important to look where those spikes are, where you might be able to find kind of some of the causes within that area that are driving those values, whether that be down to a specific manager. One example I've seen in the past is areas where recruiters are recruiting individuals, but not giving them good expectations of a role. So you'll see high turnover and it starts to kind of find those root causes as you get deeper in the data because you can see in that example, what's the source recruiter on these? Is there a trend of who's leaving, for example, in this area?

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Logan (10:05): That's a super interesting one, like seeing high turnover immediately with new hires. So one of the interesting things, we just did a webinar with Kim Ray and they talked about how their retention rate was so great. I mean, it has to be like industry standards, like 2% for manufacturing. And they started with a culture interview first. So they're almost laying the groundwork of what you're coming into before. So that's like a super interesting point that you make of like looking at the turnover from a source recruiter's perspective and what they're conveying to employees as they're coming in.

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Alex Thompson (10:40): Yeah, I know, was a big focus, and I did listen to that Kim Ray session. It was great and I was blown away by their turnover numbers. Super impressive, especially based off of some things that I've seen in previous in my career. But that cultural fit, that was a huge importance in the consulting world as well. I know when I first started, I started in consulting right out of college and some of my cohorts were philosophy majors or English majors, whereas I had maybe a management with an HR focus was where I was coming out of school. So there was less of a focus on kind of those hard skills and what you learned. And if you're the right fit for this role, that you're gonna be successful. Knowing the type of person that you're bringing in, more so than their skills, especially in those entry level roles where you can kind of build and kind of form the career for that individual.

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Logan (11:26): Yeah, and the culture piece is always in kind of the anecdotal, or it seems. I bet you there's data that we can put to that and like to answer to the business, but like in that anecdotal or less data driven portion, like how do you communicate all of that impact to the business? Like how do you pair that portion to the business?

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Alex Thompson (11:53): Yeah, so I think here I'll go kind of with that eNPS or engagement type survey. You mentioned that there's maybe not a data that points to culture, but as soon as you collect those surveys or engagement results, you do have a data point. There's stuff that you can find in there that may be able to tie to some of your more hard coded metrics, whether that be turnover, for example. I know we've got a client doing some awesome stuff related to their return to work policy and distance from home to work location. So they're looking specifically at their turnover by individuals based off of how far they are from their working location. To take the next step, you could easily pair that with your engagement results and see if there's a trend of folks saying the commute is becoming, is impacting my success at work or it's impacting the energy that I'm bringing to the organization. So you can start to kind of pull out pieces once you know what you're looking for and tie it from that qualitative data back to a hard metric.

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Logan (12:53): That's an interesting way to splice the data, because I would imagine in that return to office, the commute has to probably be one of the biggest reasons. Just outside of this scope, just the way that we're set up as a society, having work and home close together just is so difficult for people.

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Alex Thompson (13:12): Yeah, the commute is one aspect of it, but there's also the, if the commute's large, I don't know if you think about your family aspects, your kids preschool may be back at your home versus closer to your work. So it's a commute, but it also starts to snowball with the other activities you need to do between those two areas. And it's super relevant now with return to work being such a kind of in the forefront of most businesses decisions right now, or at least the directions that they're going.

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Logan (13:41): Yeah, it is. Now on the surveys portion, have you ever had pushback with proposing that for people?

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Alex Thompson (13:52): So from my experience, I've never gotten direct feedback of the thought of employee listening. Where I do hear some pushback is around the fatigue of surveys and just kind of how employees' sentiments are around them. Like, if you're launching one survey for one area of the business, but then your HR team wants to come do a broad engagement survey, that group of employees has just taken a survey, they get some fatigue, they don't want to sit there and be clicking through these surveys twice in one month. So it's important to kind of space those out, make sure they're targeted and appropriate for the right time. But then also, just kind of the next piece of fatigue is employees take these surveys and then they don't see any impact from the org, any changes. They don't hear anything from their direct leaders around what they saw in the survey.

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So that's really, I mean, and that's a cultural shift to get your leaders looking at the data and feedback that they're receiving and taking actions off of it. It's another piece where I'd say, like, if you look at it from the org top down, the feedback rolling up to the top, feedback's very different for those areas, again, depending on managers, what the work is like. So it's important to get granular and have your leaders and even kind of maybe your first line managers starting to look at that and seeing how they can be impactful, because you can generally tell from the feedback in those surveys if it's something that the employee can control or the environment that is controlling how the employee feels about the things.

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Logan (15:24): Yeah, when I've gotten pulse surveys, like a lot of times I get them every week. Is that like a normal frequency that you would recommend for sending out something like pulse surveys?

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Alex Thompson (15:35): That's way too heavy for me, in my opinion. I would understand a weekly reminder on that pulse survey if you're not taking it, to nudge the employee. That's part of the complexities of it too. How do we get these employees engaged and want to take these surveys? But I would say maybe the more regular cadence I'd see would be like a quarterly pulse survey. And that's a good way so you can start to say, okay, here's how our number changed between March and end of August. What did we do in that time period that's impacted that number? So you can then start to kind of look at when you have it in those large enough windows, but with enough frequency that you can see kind of the tactical decisions and how those are impacting things. And then maybe take a look at the end of the year. How did our strategic decisions from that first survey come into play and impact our final numbers of the year?

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Logan (16:25): Yeah, like surveys are always super easy for office-based workers. And I say super easy because we're sitting at computers and running everything, but like how are people typically delivering these surveys when their workers aren't office-based? They're all frontline workers, you know, manufacturers. Like we talked to Kimray, I think UGI, where you just, where you came from was frontline based. Like how are you, how are people delivering surveys that way?

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Alex Thompson (16:56): Yeah, there's kind of two parts to the question here, I think. The first part that we always had the discussions of, should we assess these frontline workers in the same way that we're assessing our white collar office workers? I was always the stance of, yes, we should. They're still employees. They have the same benefits and are impacted by the business decisions in the same way. Now, union can come into play with that and there's some limitations of what you can and can't do with your union workforce. But from just kind of a frontline worker perspective, I would say it's important to assess them the same way you're assessing your other employees in the business. Because again, they have similar interactions that are impacted in the same way by decisions. In terms of.

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Logan (17:37): Sorry, I want to stop there because I want to pick up on that because I spent five years, you know, marketing and doing stuff for frontline employees and it's crazy how many people want to treat the two, you know, sets of workforces entirely differently. And I did an interview with Built Brands energy bars. And they implemented basically running performance reviews and everything exactly like their white collar workforce to their blue collar workforces. And the engagement went up, and it was considered progressive. Like that's a really good point to put in there, because if people have the two different sets of workforces, you know, treating them differently probably isn't necessary, I don't think.

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Alex Thompson (18:30): There's situations where you have to and you kind of have to consider those things. But again, I think for the engagement survey, the second you change it up from this population to the next, you're not comparing the same things. And I don't think they're a compatible data set that you should be comparing your results to, because you're fundamentally changing the thought process or what's going into the output of that survey. So I think it's important to maintain that consistency, and then maybe change how you view or read into the information, but the administration is, I think it's important to be consistent on, from my perspective.

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Logan (19:07): Yeah, yeah, that's a good call out. So, all right, so if you remember the second portion of that question, now that I've interrupted you, where were we gonna go with that section?

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Alex Thompson (19:17): Yeah, so we were going towards kind of the administration perspective and how to do it. So it's a tough question and it depends on the capabilities within your organization. I know specifically at UGI, we had a lot of our frontline workforce had handheld devices that they could access it on, but we maybe didn't have our SuccessFactors optimized for that mobile environment. So we would make some steps to kind of give them opportunities throughout their day to where they were in front of a computer to possibly take that, whether that be in the morning at the start of their shifts, et cetera. But then again, we did use those iPods. The optimization maybe wasn't perfect, but it was an opportunity to kind of have something in your hand as opposed to the laptop that they were using on a daily basis.

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I interned in a manufacturing facility and we had some desktops throughout the floor that employees could kind of access their records through. So just having those, we would call it kind of like a kiosk type setup where the landing page, there's not, it's not a blank desktop that they can go in and do whatever, but point to the applications that they need for their workforce and their day to get through that. So having kind of peripherals, maybe they're not dedicated to the employee, but they're available for them to take those through. But then also communicating ways to take that at home. I don't like pushing employees to do these surveys outside of their work. I don't think that's a great experience for anybody. I don't want to take these, should be done throughout your kind of your nine to five job in my opinion, but the option should be there if the employee wants to provide their input. Because there's nothing worse than wanting to communicate and give feedback but not, but running into a blocker, whether that blocker just be a login. It can sometimes be enough of a step to push that person out and say, okay, I don't care that much about doing this. So making things streamlined and accessible, easy to access at any point throughout the day, I would say, when these workers find a gap, because their days are a bit more rigid and task-based than maybe some of your office workers.

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Logan (21:17): Yeah, yeah, that's a good call out. I mean, what do you think, what are the two biggest challenges when you're in an HR team that has, you know, 50% plus frontline workers?

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Alex Thompson (21:31): I was thinking about this prior to hopping on here and I do think we're probably going to sense a change here in the blue collar workforce. It's going to be getting younger here as people age out. So those folks are going to be bringing more technologically savvy and expectation that some of the white collar workers may have had for years now. So I think really the largest struggle is getting the supervisors within the field to kind of have the same responses and treat and value this feedback as opposed to taking it kind of as a negative. I don't think the two-way feedback model is super relevant in a field-based resource, field-based setup right now. I think there's probably a little bit more hesitancy between that group and that approach. So again, getting the managers to value the feedback and take action on it, but not retaliatory action, like meaningful action and improvement, improvements based off of it, what they're hearing.

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Logan (22:29): I would imagine that the workforce is gonna get younger. You have this weird world right now where you have kind of a contraction going on in the white collar world and you have mass labor shortages still and a tight labor market in that segment. It's just like, there's just...

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Alex Thompson (22:46): I don't have any stats to back it up. It's a hunch and it's kind of based off of what I've kind of seen interacting with some of our clients. But I do think kind of the sentiments and the types of people in those roles may be shifting.

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Logan (23:01): I think that's, there's probably definitely data behind that because in doing the Kim Ray webinar preparation, I did a segment on kind of the two different worlds that we're living in, an HR sitting in between them. And there's like a 40% shortage in manufacturing construction alone. And I have at least anecdotal from somebody I know who's in construction where he's seeing all of the applications come from, and he's seeing a bunch of tech applications come from, and there's like, I guess if they can project manage and, you know, tech, they can come project manage here too, so.

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Alex Thompson (23:38): Yeah, I look back to college. I know we had, even within the business school at Penn State, had construction companies that were recruiting directly out of there for project managers. So maybe not looking for the construction experience, but the leadership and ability to run a project.

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Logan (23:54): Yeah, so that's, I think an astute thing, it's definitely a shifting environment for sure. And it's interesting because they have two different sets of challenges, I think. Well, Alex, like what other remaining advice do you have for HR leaders kind of navigating the current environment that you'd want to leave them with?

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Alex Thompson (24:15): I would say that data is just becoming more and more relevant every day. I know that the big buzzword that this has become so relevant to my career over the past few years is we keep hearing these quarterly business reviews. Leadership wants to be involved and informed to what's happening with your employee and people on a regular basis. Leadership is getting more interested in the people aspect of things, on top of the financials and the strategic decisions. So having those resources prepped and bringing a clear and concise picture and pointing out those key points to your leadership, once you're given that platform, it's important that now you have that platform to inform them with what you as an HR leader should be driving in your business, using those data points and providing consistent ones to inform the direction you wanna go.

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Logan (25:03): Good, that is great advice. And if you're not doing quarterly business reviews, I guess you can, one way to build that trust is to start formatting a deck or a presentation and sending that off as your quarterly business review, a super tactical thing. Even if it's an email, I would imagine that your leadership team would love that.

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Alex Thompson (25:25): I think you'd be surprised how many times I've heard, I didn't know we had this information, or I didn't know we could produce this. So there's a lot you can bring that may feel simple to you as an HR leadership, but may go along as an HR leader, but may go a long ways with the leadership elsewhere in the business.

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Logan (25:42): Well, that is a great way to end the episode. Alex, thank you for the time.

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Alex Thompson (25:48): All right, thank you.

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Logan (25:49): Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Pulse, the podcast that has real conversations with HR leaders linking people to performance. HRBench is the people analytics platform that turns HR data into business strategy. It connects to all your tools, HRIS, ATS, payroll, surveys, whatever you're using. In just a few clicks, you get over 45 metrics instantly visualized in boardroom ready dashboards, benchmarked by industry and company size. Book a demo at HRbench.com and we'll build you a custom benchmark report using your data.