HR Analytics – HeadCount and FTE

HeadCount and FTE are the two most important key figures in HR reporting and analytics. They give you the basic information about the amount of people working in the company and in which areas they work inside the company. They are used in planning the capacity needed for different projects and tasks giving the current supply of people and used in calculations like 'cost per FTE', 'revenue per FTE' etc. They are also part of official reporting to authorities. Definitions HeadCount: All employees at the company count as 1 (is employed). FTE: Full time equivalent (If employee works only half-time then he/she gets value 0.5) How to source the figures We start with the picture below where HeadCounts and FTE are presented as separate tables connected to other main HR tables. HeadCounts are usually sourced from Employment Contract table in company's basic HR system. Usual level of detail is HeadCount per month and the definition can be for example 'valid work contract at last day of month' gives you the value 1. Additional Measurements can be taken by taking only active employees that are not on long leave of absence or filtering out persons who are not directly employed by the company but are contractors (consultants) for the company. Below the HeadCount table is presented in star-schema type setting where dimensions/other information from Employment Contract is joined directly to HeadCount. This allows users to easily slice and dice the HeadCount figures. Some headache can be received from employees that run multiple work contracts at the same corporation at the same time at different legal companies. In these cases one may decide that these are all counted as 1. Another way is to count them as separate employees but introduce the possibility to show it both ways in the BI tool. FTEs are usually calculated differently for employees with Monthly work contract and employees with hourly work contract. Source for calculating FTEs for employees with Monthly employment contract is usually the Employment Contract table and the start of the definition is a bit different than HeadCounts by Month: Give value 1 if the employee has valid work contract during the whole month. If the employee has a work contract for only half of the month then the value is 0.5. Usually different versions of FTEs are calculated: In another version we deduct absences, hours or days during the month from the previous figure, or deduct only non-paid absences from that figure. Also monthly employees with half-time work contract should get only 0.5 figure. FTEs for hourly employees are usually sourced from paid wages (hours). We take the paid work hours during the month and divide it with full time working hours of the month, again full time working gives the figure 1. Below is the star-schema data model for FTE calculations. One difference between HeadCounts and FTEs is that usually FTEs are split to different costcentres whereas HeadCounts are shown at the costcentre of the main employment contract. Also an important considerations is that most companies don't want their HeadCount and FTE-figures to keep changing forever, although it is possible to make corrections to source system. For example if one notices that HR core system has a wrong employment contract (person never existed) and a correction is made to HR system then usually HR reporting figures should still stay the same, especially if it has been over one year already since the mistake happened. HeadCount and FTE calculations on the detailed level can be quite complicated and require a deep knowledge of the subject area in order to be succesfull in it.