How many full time HR employees does your organization need?

Steve Wexler at i4cp is frequently asked a difficult question: "How many full time HR employees should my organization have." In an attempt to answer it, Steve enlisted Tableau Public and a recent HR survey to create the following visualization. The viz evaluates the 850 companies in the survey based on the number of full time HR employees they have and how successful the organization is as a whole (based on revenue growth, profitability and customer satisfaction). Take advantage of the interactivity to find out how many HR employees your organization should have.

Broadly, the bottom chart tells us that the highest performing organizations have slightly more full time HR employees than the lower performers. If you select a smaller organization size, say 1 to 99, this difference is magnified, perhaps because smaller organizations are growing faster and need more attention per employee. Although every situation is unique, this viz seems to show that it is better to err on the side of excess with HR employees, than be caught with too few hands!

Labels: The data labels on the "Ratio" view make it much easier to quickly understand the content of the viz. Instead of having to mouse over for a tooltip, users can just read.