The industry focus on engagement as a cure-all for organizational woes continues to be misguided. Instead, human resource (HR) departments need to focus on employee experiences. Bold? Yes. Backed by data? Absolutely. Two recent studies (2016 and 2017) found that the top drivers of 30+ organizations’ outcomes were management, job fit, and senior leadership ”with management being the most consistent driver of outcomes.

Getting you on board with this line of thinking requires us to be on the same page regarding your goal in HR. I would argue that HR is most likely impacting their organization’s bottom line, but HR leaders aren’t demonstrating this to executives.

Good news: this can change. Shifting the focus from typical HR outcomes of interest such as employee engagement or job satisfaction, to business outcomes such as customer satisfaction or financial performance is the first step. HR leaders need to go beyond slicing and dicing HR data and start demonstrating direct connections to business metrics that matter most to executives ”and that’s where these recent studies focused.

The outcomes in the 2017 study included, but were not limited to, sales revenue, percent to budget metrics, and customer and patient satisfaction. For simplicity, various financial metrics were combined under one group ”Financial Performance ”and Customer and Patient Satisfaction (the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems “ HCAHPS) measures were combined into one Customer Satisfaction group. The results from the 2017 study are in Table 1.