Define Your Business Priorities & KPIs

Modified on Tue, 21 May at 7:48 AM

The first step in designing your listening and employee transformation programs is defining your business priorities and key performance indicators (KPIs). By defining these upfront, you are able to focus your efforts to drive the insights, action, and business outcomes you’re looking to achieve. Whether you are partnering with our Perceptyx Employee Transformation experts or building your programs on your own, this article walks through how to identify your priorities, determine how you will measure them, and what outcomes you’re looking to achieve.


This article walks through:


Identify Your Key Business & Talent Priorities

Your key business and talent priorities represent your top objectives you aim to accomplish this year and that are crucial to your organization’s success. If you are working with our team of Employee Transformation Experts, your Customer Success Manager will partner with you on identifying and quantifying these objectives. After your business and talent priorities are identified, Perceptyx will load them into the People Insights Platform, to be used as the starting point for creating outcomes-based listening events. 


Begin by considering:

  • What are the most important business issues you’re focused on today?

  • What challenges are you facing which, if overcome, would enable greater success?

  • What do you think is the top priority or challenge your executive leadership team is focused on right now?


Based on your answers to these questions, select your key business and talent priorities from our recommended business and talent priorities. This is a list of the most common business and talent priorities based on our people analytics research.


  1. Identify your top business and talent priorities.

    • Employee Engagement/eNPS

    • Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

    • Psychological Safety

    • Safety Culture

    • Employee Health & Well-Being

    • Customer Orientation/Centricity

    • Manager Effectiveness 

    • Employee Performance/Employee Productivity

    • Employee Retention

    • Career Progression/Career Pathways

    • Continuous Improvement/Innovation

    • Transformation & Change

    • M&A Change Management

    • Hybrid Work Experience

    • Profitability/Efficiency

    • Sustainability


Note: Generally, we recommend identifying 2-3 business and talent priorities, and no more than 5 to ensure focused efforts and success. 


Identify Your Business Outcomes & KPIs

Once you’ve identified your business and talent priorities, we recommend you identify the quantifiable business outcome measures you plan to use to determine the success of your listening and employee experience programs. Refer to our business and talent priority to business outcomes matrix to help identify business outcomes that help you quantify and determine your success.


  1. For each business and talent priority, select your business outcomes.

  2. For each priority & outcome, identify your key performance metric:

    • Baseline – Where are you today?

    • Target – Where do you want to be in a year?

  3. Document these in your Insights and Actions Blueprint Strategy, checking in on a monthly or quarterly basis to measure progress.


Recommended Associated Business Outcome Measures

Employee Engagement / eNPS

  • Increased participation rates (surveys and other listening events)

  • Improved pride in the company, improved morale and sentiment

  • Improved intent to stay with the company, decreased employee turnover

  • Improved willingness to recommend the company

  • Increase in job referrals from employees

  • Improved employment brand/Improved employment ratings

  • Improved sense of personal accomplishment and discretionary effort

  • Improved willingness to recommend the company’s products and services

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging

  • Increased employee engagement across specific or underrepresented demographic groups

  • Decrease in reported bias, discrimination or harassment

  • Fair and equal pay across demographic groups within job roles, job levels, etc.

  • Fair and representative demographic diversity across job roles, job levels, etc.

  • Fair and representative demographic diversity within candidate pool(s) and hiring decisions

  • Fair and representative demographic diversity for internal promotion decisions

  • Equal/representative demographic diversity of voluntary leavers

Psychological Safety

  • Improved respect, inclusivity, and belonging

  • Lower rates of bullying, harassment, or discrimination

  • Healthy expression of disagreement and reduced conflict

  • Increased participation, sharing ideas, two-way communications and feedback

  • Increased innovation through comfort in experimentation and proposing new ideas

  • Improved readiness to change and recovery from setbacks

  • Increased speed in decision-making


Safety Culture

  • Reduced accidents and near-miss rate

  • Reduced injuries and near-miss rate

  • Reduced severity of injury rate

  • Increased reporting compliance

  • Improved emergency preparedness

  • Decreased workers’ compensation costs

  • Increased regulatory compliance

  • Reduced time missed as a result of incidents

Employee Health & Well-Being

  • Increased employee engagement

  • Reduced employee stress / burnout

  • Improved employee mental health

  • Improved employee physical health

  • Reduced absenteeism

  • Reduced medical claims

  • Decrease in perceived unmanageable workloads

  • Decreased digital day length or overtime needed

Customer Orientation / Centricity

  • Increased customer satisfaction / improved NPS

  • Increased repeat purchases, share of wallet, and/or lifetime value

  • Increased customer loyalty

  • Increased customer retention

  • Decrease in number of customer complaints or disputes

  • Improved speed of resolving customer issues, complaints and disputes

  • Improved customer feedback on new products and services

  • Increased willingness to recommend company’s products and services

  • Improved brand reputation

Manager Effectiveness

  • Improved manager ratings (Survey & 360)

  • Increased employee engagement

  • Improved employee performance

  • Increased promotion and internal mobility

  • Increased attendance / reduced absenteeism

  • Reduced employee turnover (of managers)

  • Reduced employee turnover (within managers’ teams)

  • Improved conflict resolution

  • Improved innovation and problem-solving

Employee Performance / Employee Productivity

  • Increased output and quantity (e.g. units produced, tasks completed)

  • Increased activities (e.g. emails sent, calls logged, meetings attended)

  • Improved response time (e.g. response time to inquiries or service requests)

  • Improved/higher performance rating

  • Improved sales performance (e.g. revenue generated, customers acquired)

  • Improved billable hours (e.g. performing above KPI targets, increased utilization)

  • Increased project completion (e.g. project work on-time, within budget)

  • Improved revenue (per sq. ft., per employee, compared with quota)

Employee Retention

  • Improved intent to stay with the company

  • Decreased employee turnover

  • Equal/representative demographic diversity of voluntary leavers

  • Increased retention of new joiners

  • Reduced hiring spend

  • Increased internal mobility

  • Increased average length of service

  • Increased likelihood of rehire

Career Progression / Career Pathways


  • Improved clarity of career path stages

  • Improved succession planning

  • Increased job mobility

  • Decreased average time in role

  • Increased efficacy of performance reviews

  • Improved identification of key talent

  • Increased training adoption / increase in skills and knowledge

  • Reduction in regrettable losses

Continuous Improvement / Innovation

  • Time and cost savings

  • Improved processes (streamlining / optimizing)

  • Removing barriers / eliminating non-value-added activities

  • Reduced error rates

  • Increased cost savings

  • Increased number of patents filed / patents granted

  • Release of new products / new services / new processes

  • Improved time-to-market for new products / new services

  • Increased revenue from new products / new services

Transformation & Change

  • Introduction of new processes (streamlining / optimizing)

  • Increased openness to change

  • Return on Investment (financial gain from change initiative)

  • Increased cost savings

  • Increased customer satisfaction / improved customer feedback

  • Increased efficiency

  • Increased quality

M&A Change Management

  • Decreasing culture gap (becoming “one organization”)

  • Increased revenue growth / increased market share

  • Improved share price

  • Improved brand reputation

  • Increased customer satisfaction / improved customer feedback

  • Improved employee retention / decreased voluntary turnover

Hybrid Work Experience

  • Monitoring hybrid working trends and preferences

  • Increased “talent anywhere” recruitment

  • Improved access to resources / support for hybrid and remote workers

  • Improved work-life-balance / improved well-being

  • Increased employee productivity

  • Improved job fulfillment

  • Improved collaboration

  • Improved alignment with company’s strategic direction

  • Improved retention / reduced attrition

Profitability / Efficiency

  • Increased net profit

  • Increased net profit margin

  • Increased gross profit margin

  • Increased operating profit margin

  • Improved revenue growth rate

  • Reduced product waste

  • Increased compliance with efficiency programs

  • Reduce cost of goods sold

  • Reduced shrink (retail)

  • Other

Sustainability

  • Improved carbon footprint

  • Improved water footprint

  • Improved energy consumption

  • Reduced supply chain miles

  • Improved waste reduction rate

  • Improved waste recycling rate

  • Improved product recycling rate

  • Other

Patient Satisfaction (Healthcare)

  • Increased HCAHPS Score

  • Other



Identify Your Partnership Success Measures, Outcomes & KPIs

In addition to your business and talent priorities, we recommend you identify your Partnership Success Measures, outcomes, and KPIs. Partnership Success Measures gauge tangible impact on key initiatives, enhancing employee experience and business outcomes. If you are working with our team of Employee Transformation Experts, your Customer Success Manager will partner with you on identifying and quantifying these measures.


Begin by considering:

  • How will we know when we are successful in solving those business problems? 

  • What are the measurable results we should be tracking together? 

  • How are those connected with our overall business strategy?


Based on your answers to these questions, identify your key partnership success measures. This is a list of the most common partnership success measures based on our people analytics research.


  1. Identify your top partnership success measures.
    Refer to the matrix below or select your own.


Common Partnership Success Measures

What additional outcomes can we support you with this year as your People Insights & Action partner?


Drive Impact / Action

  • Improve speed to action from insights

  • Assess progress and impact of actions

Leaders Accountability

  • Empower leaders at all levels of the organization to understand and act on their results

  • Provide development focused feedback to leaders and managers

Advanced Analytics

  • Understand connection between listening data / indexes and business performance

  • Understand key milestones and connections across the employee lifecycle

Internal Success

  • Position the organization as a leader in People Insights & Action

  • Embed employee listening into the organization’s culture, extending beyond HR

Thought Leadership

  • Facilitate networking and learning opportunities with other Perceptyx customers

  • Collaborate on thought leadership and research in People Insights and Action


  1. For each partnership success measure, identify your key performance metric:

    • Baseline – Where are you today?

    • Target – Where do you want to be in a year?

  2. Document these in your Insights and Actions Blueprint Strategy, checking in on a monthly or quarterly basis to measure progress.


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