HR BENCHMARKING

What is Benchmarking?

"Benchmarking is a tool to help you improve your business processes. Any business process can be benchmarked."

" Benchmarking is the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance."

"Benchmarking is a highly respected practice in the business world. It is an activity that looks outward to find best practice and high performance and then measures actual business operations against those goals."

One of the approaches to HR performance monitoring is Benchmarking. Benchmarking denotes a comparison with selected performance indicators from different organizations typically in the same industry, or with comparable organizations that are considered to be the best in class. One of the biggest mistakes people make when beginning their benchmarking endeavor is that they only look to benchmark someone within their own industry. Although this doesn't hurt, you probably already know enough about your industry to know what works and what doesn't. Worse yet, some people think they must benchmark their competitor. What if the competition is worse than your company? Seems like a pretty good waste of time and energy. Instead how about benchmarking a company that is well known for being a good model. Sometimes referred to as Best Practices, Exemplary Practices, and Business Excellence. Successful benchmarking requires careful selection and manipulation of comparable measures. The greatest gains from benchmarking exercise are provided through comparisons with other firms and different ways of thinking. Many firms strive for performance improvements by benchmarking standards of excellence from other firms in such areas as production, research and development and marketing. HR can be employed to similar competitive advantage.

Benchmarking serves a number of purposes:

1) It enables a company to calibrate how it is delivering HR practices by examining the way other organizations accomplish tasks and responsibilities

2) Benchmarking enables a company to learn from others successes and mistakes.

3) Benchmarking can create an environment in which active learning is encouraged.

4) It can be used as a tool to motivate people to change.

5) Benchmarking can be used to help set direction and priorities for an HR manager and helps him to focus on critical activities.

6) A well established benchmarking process can help managers set goals and targets designed to make the company the best in its competitive field, and to initiate focused programs that move the company from its current position.

By Benchmarking one can find out;

• Who does the business process really well and has processes that are adaptable to my organization

• What areas are causing the most trouble

• Which employees contribute most to the critical success factors

• What are the performance measures to determine the effect of our actions?

• Who is the most compatible for me to benchmark with

• Most business processes are common throughout industry.

Source : Research Article published by Learning and Development Association at University of Houston, Texas and Wikipedia