The Four Most Critical HR Metrics You Should Be Watching in 2023

HR leaders understand that it’s critical to measure the effectiveness of HR strategies. The issue is that most HR metrics have traditionally relied on standard measurements that hopefully align with the bottom line.  But HR teams in 2023 must emphasize a people-centered strategy that measures how employees feel about their place of work and then […]

Critical HR Metrics

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HR leaders understand that it’s critical to measure the effectiveness of HR strategies. The issue is that most HR metrics have traditionally relied on standard measurements that hopefully align with the bottom line. 

But HR teams in 2023 must emphasize a people-centered strategy that measures how employees feel about their place of work and then connect these science-based metrics to their significant impact on organizational success. 

 Employees are critical components of any organization. So why don’t we know how they feel about their workplace?

Business leaders generally agree that employee engagement is essential. A Gartner survey of HR leaders reported that 47% of participants identified employee experience as a “top priority”. When asked if HR leaders still need to analyze employee engagement, one expert responded, “It’s always engagement.”

Yet, many employers face the same hiring and retention challenges year after year because they’re focusing solely on standard metrics and ignoring how employees feel about their workplace.

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Louis Carter

People-centered strategies are the foundation for improving all HR metrics.

People data analytics takes a different approach to measuring the effectiveness of HR strategies by focusing on identifying the level of employee engagement and the factors that motivate them.

It embraces the concept that workers want to love what they do and where they do it, and they’re willing to leave companies that don’t provide and nurture that environment.  

The 4 critical HR metrics for 2023

Employers in 2023 must recognize the importance of treating their employees more like valued customers and utilize tools to measure how effective they are at maintaining that level of satisfaction and engagement.

1. Employee Sentiment and Love of Workplace

Employee sentiment may be the most valuable tool for measuring HR effectiveness in 2023. At the Best Practice Institute, we’ve incorporated our Most Loved Workplace ® (MLW) Love of Workplace Index™audit for 100s of companies as a predictor of critical organizational outcomes that are reliable and valid.

Our research has shown a strong correlation between the MLW audit and employee commitment, innovation, and performance. When combined with a suite of assessments, test results were three times more potent than a personality assessment alone. 

Instead of static, rigid, and often difficult-to-answer surveys, our MLW ® app uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and machine learning to analyze employee comments and measure an employee’s actual emotions and feelings towards their company.  

Our Love of Workplace Index ™ illustrates that 95% of employees are up to 4 times more likely to perform better when they love their work and stay with that employer longer than if they didn’t love their workplace.  

2. Attrition/flight risk

Attrition continues to be a significant issue for most organizations. SHRM recommends using flight risk models to identify which employee profiles are most likely to leave their workplace, enabling HR to make strategic decisions.

3. Business-related performance metrics

Thriving organizations experience both top-down and bottom-up excellence. Employees cannot achieve their full potential without the support of their organization, with appropriate feed-forward,  and organizations that create nurturing environments won’t be successful if employees aren’t motivated.

4. Talent acquisition/quality of hire

The quality of hire can be challenging to assess. The intent is to measure the value an employee brings to the workplace and, by design, must include a variety of factors to assess the amount of that value.

It’s broad but can be an excellent metric to assess the overall return on investment.

Employers increasingly recognize that the most critical measurements include analyzing how much employees love their workplace. 

HR and business leaders who incorporate a science-based approach to understanding employee motivation and incorporate it into their business operations at every level will foster inclusive, nurturing workplaces where employees want to work.

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Frequently Asked Questions

The biggest large employer culture challenges during a spinout or major transformation include: maintaining consistent culture signals across geographically dispersed teams, preventing a vacuum of identity when the legacy brand disappears, and preserving the informal trust networks that made the old organization function. Companies like Kyndryl, which spun out of IBM with 73,000 employees across 5 continents, show that culture infrastructure—systematic onboarding, explicit values, leadership accessibility—must be deliberately built, not assumed to transfer.

Maintaining consistent culture across global offices requires moving from aspirational values to operational infrastructure. The evidence from Kyndryl's Most Loved Workplace certification shows that when employees in Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, South America, and the UK independently describe their culture using the same language—'flexible work,' 'you are heard,' 'career and learning outcomes'—it is not coincidence. It is the result of systematic design: shared onboarding, visible leadership behavior, and consistent feedback loops that translate values into daily experience regardless of location or time zone.

A Most Loved Workplace® certification proves that a company's culture claims are independently verified through employee assessment—not self-reported surveys or marketing copy. The certification uses machine learning to analyze sentiment, emotion, and recurring themes across thousands of employee responses. When a large employer like Kyndryl earns this certification despite a major transformation, it demonstrates that their culture infrastructure survived and scaled through disruption, which is the hardest test any organizational culture can face.

About Louis Carter

Louis Carter is the Founder and CEO of Best Practice Institute (BPI) and Most Loved Workplaces®, a global research and certification organization helping companies build workplaces employees love. He is the creator of the Love of Workplace Index™, a research-based framework used to measure emotional connection between employees and their organizations and predict performance, retention, and culture outcomes. Carter is the author of more than a dozen books on leadership, talent development, and management best practices and has advised Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and global organizations on leadership and culture transformation. He also hosted the Leader Show, a leadership interview series featured on Newsweek for five years, interviewing executives and leadership experts about leadership and the future of work. His work on workplace culture and leadership has been featured in major publications including Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. Learn more in “How Louis Carter’s Most Loved Workplace Measures What Really Matters” (New York Business Now) and “Beyond Employer Branding: How Louis Carter Built the Global Standard for Workplace Culture” (NY Tech Media)

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