A dashboard should answer one question …
“What should be do next?”
I think the purpose of a people analytics dashboard is often misunderstood.
Most organisations expect a dashboard to tell them everything about their workforce – so as more data comes in, more charts get added, more filters, more KPIs, until it’s basically a data warehouse with a nice UI.
The trouble is, nobody makes a better decision by being handed more information. They make it by being handed the right information.
The best dashboards I’ve built are nearly always the simplest. Not because the underlying data was simple, but because someone sat down and decided which questions actually mattered. Every chart earns its place, or it doesn’t get included.
When I’m working with clients, I ask one question about every visual: what decision will someone make after looking at this? Sometimes the answer comes from one chart on its own. More often it’s two or three things read together that get someone there. Either way, if I can’t point to the insight and the decision which could flow from it, it comes off the page.
A dashboard doesn’t need to tell the whole story of the business. It needs to help one person make one decision, faster or better than they could before.
Here’s the bit nobody expects: leaving things out is harder than putting them in. Anyone can add another chart. It takes actual judgement to say “this isn’t important enough to show”, even when the data’s right there and someone asks for it.
That’s usually the difference between a dashboard people admire and one they actually open every week, refer to, and use to make positive changes.
Have you found this? Where cutting something out made a report more useful, not less?
Contact me for a no obligation chat about people analytics dashboards and how to get the best out of them.
