Maybe you're proud of the sheer productivity of your HR department. Your ratio of HR pros to employees is lower than the industry average, most transactional HR activities are delivered via self-service, and you have a finely tuned shared-services center. Generally speaking, your HR function is a lean, mean efficiency machine.
Good for you. There's just one problem. By itself, it's not nearly enough.
This is one of the findings from the Future of HR study conducted by i4cp in partnership with the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) at USC's Marshall School of Business. We found, for example, that having a low HR-to-employee ratio is not in itself a great predictor of market performance, though that story changes for very large, commercial entities. So, while it's smart to benchmark such ratios to gauge efficiency, they seem a lot less critical than some other HR characteristics, at least for organizations with 1,000 or more employees.
