What (Definition)

‘Percent of Headcount’ represents the headcount in a segment (team or department, for example) as a proportion of total headcount in a company.

Why (Benefits)

It helps answer questions like the below.

• How is the distribution of current Headcount by Departments?

• Where is the headcount concentrated?

For example, in certain technology companies, 25% will be in Engineering department while an accounting services company may have high % of employees in Accounting Department.

Is our employee mix as diverse as expected?

In addition to being an informational metric, this could also be an actionable metric where goals can be set around this and measured.

For example, Diversity goals could be set as “Female Employees should make up 50 % of all employees in the company”.

This metric helps measure and monitor actual diversity vs expected.

How (Calculation)

Formula: (Count of Employees in a segment / Count of All Employees in the Company) *100

Let’s take a simple dataset where we have headcount in each department of the company as shown below.

Accounting department has 14 employees which is 7% of the total 190 employees in the company.

It is very common to segment this metric by

• Organization groups such as Department, Location, Job Type, Job Category, Job Level, Job Title

• Employee attributes such as Gender, Ethnicity, Age group and Tenure.

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Now, it’s your turn

Do you measure % of headcount? How do you use it? Please share your thoughts. I look forward to learning from you.