Canadian HR Reporter

Mark Kristmanson CEO of the National Capital Commission in Ottawa The Crown corporation has 412 employees W hile he's only been CEO of the National Capital Commission (NCC) in Ottawa for about three months, Mark Kristmanson has already been busy — and he has big plans — when it comes to HR metrics. "I fi nd the metrics indispens- able so I've been using them to understand the workforce profi le and to understand what latent issues there may be within our structure," he says. e NCC is the planner and steward for Canada's capital re- gion, with 412 employees along with about 75 students in the sum- mer and a number of part-time and contract employees. e pro- fi le of workers includes landscape architects, industrial designers, biologists and archaeologists. In the fall, 83 employees were transferred to the Department of Canadian Heritage, so metrics are helpful in understanding the impact of that change, says Krist- manson. For example, an employ- ee satisfaction survey provides a baseline for the next year. "We have a dashboard that has been developed over the past few years that takes information out of our PeopleSoft system and gives a fairly nuanced understanding of everything from absenteeism to performance accolades and everything in between, so that dashboard is quite useful." Kristmanson also makes a point to do site visits and meet with groups in-person as employees can be fairly far-fl ung. A combi- nation of metrics, visits and front- line exposure gives him the whole picture, he says. "I can see a couple of areas where we can look at maybe con- trolling overtime a little bit more. I can see some disparities between the different branches and so forth, so we're going to be looking at that." e goal of the metrics is to help guide the corporation to exceptional quality and a high level of talent and innovation in a culture where that can fl ourish, he says, while also strengthening client-relations management. " is is an area where I'm hop- ing we can use some of (HR's) techniques to actually improve our client-relations profi le with the outside community," says Kristmanson. "One of the things that really interests me — and our PeopleSoft is not delivering in as much detail as I would like — is the education profi le of the workforce. I know how many have graduated from high school and had some connection to a college or university, but I would like to know how many graduated, have graduate degrees, and I'd like to start using the talent in those areas of specialization to have stronger community relations with particular stakeholders in those areas." Another area where Kristman- son hopes to make progress is with employment equity, as the NCC hasn't been as strong as it needs to be, he says. " at's a basic statistic but there may be something to learn from the fi ner grain of other metrics. And… I've been thinking I can maybe read this material or have staff read this material a little more imaginatively to see where we might move to aff ect that indicator." Succession planning is also a high priority as 58 per cent of NCC's workforce is over age 45. "I've seen a list of im- pending retirements and so forth so that's a very useful set of metrics to understand where we're going to need to do recruitment or to develop internal talent to take over, and there's some critical roles in there that we really need to plan for." ere are also three fine-grain metrics of interest, he says, which have to do with turnover — the total top-quartile performer resignations rate; how many people resigned with- in the fi rst two years of ser- vice; and capacity-build- ing, which is learning and development investment per full- time continuing employee. And while HR has improved its methods when it comes to com- piling and understanding metrics, Kristmanson says he'd like to see some changes. " e interpretation of the data into the senior management group is something that we're going to work on. It's been, up till now, something that the head of HR and the CEO have pretty much shared between them, as far as I can see, so I'd like to have my senior executives brought into this so that we can benefi t a little more widely from this and strat- egize a little bit more about how to use them." CEOs TALK Numbers, numbers everywhere CEOs reveal what they're looking for when it comes to HR metrics F E A T U R E S

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