The 10 HR Metrics Every CEO Should Track (2026 Edition)
The 10 HR metrics that predict whether your business is compounding or leaking talent. Formulas, benchmarks, and how to read each number.
Written for Myanmar CEOs, founders, and country heads who want a 5-minute monthly read on whether their people engine is healthy.
Most CEOs read 40 finance metrics and zero HR metrics. The 10 below are the ones that correlate most tightly with business outcomes: retention, hiring speed, payroll integrity, and productivity. If your HR team can't hand you these 10 in one page, they can't see the business clearly — and neither can you.
The 10 metrics
1. Annualized voluntary attrition rate
Formula: (Voluntary leavers last 12 months / Average headcount last 12 months) × 100
Why it matters: Every 10% of voluntary attrition costs you 30–50% of that person's annual salary to replace (recruitment, ramp time, lost productivity). A 100-person company with 20% voluntary attrition loses MMK 300–500 million/year in replacement cost alone.
Myanmar benchmark:
- Good: under 12%
- Typical: 15–20%
- Alarm: over 25%
2. Regrettable vs total attrition
Formula: (High-performer leavers / Total leavers) × 100
Why it matters: Total attrition can look fine while the best people leave and the weak stay. Regrettable attrition is the number that tells you whether you're losing your top third.
Read it like this: If 40%+ of leavers were high performers, you have a culture/comp/leadership problem — not an HR problem.
3. 90-day new hire retention
Formula: (New hires still active at day 90 / Total new hires) × 100
Why it matters: Losing a hire in the first 90 days usually means bad hiring or bad onboarding. Both are fixable.
Myanmar benchmark:
- Good: above 90%
- Typical: 80–88%
- Alarm: under 75%
4. Time to hire (average)
Formula: Average days from req approval to offer acceptance
Why it matters: Slow hiring means the best candidates get snapped up by faster competitors. It also means roles stay open, workload falls on existing staff, and attrition risk rises.
Myanmar benchmark:
- Good: under 30 days
- Typical: 35–50 days
- Alarm: over 60 days
5. Offer acceptance rate
Formula: (Offers accepted / Offers extended) × 100
Why it matters: Low acceptance rate means your comp is uncompetitive, your interview process turned them off, or your brand doesn't convert. Each is diagnosable.
Myanmar benchmark:
- Good: above 85%
- Typical: 70–82%
- Alarm: under 65%
6. Payroll error rate
Formula: (Payroll lines with errors / Total payroll lines) × 100
Why it matters: A single payroll error is an employee trust hit. A 1% error rate in a 200-employee company is 2 employees getting paid wrong every month — and those 2 talk about it.
Target: 0%. Anything above 0.3% needs investigation.
7. Overtime as % of base salary
Formula: (Total OT cost last 12 months / Total base salary last 12 months) × 100
Why it matters: Sustained OT >15% of base is a signal you're understaffed, not efficient. It also increases Factories Act exposure.
Myanmar benchmark:
- Healthy: under 10%
- Typical in growing firms: 10–18%
- Alarm: over 20%
8. Leave utilization rate
Formula: (Leave days taken / Leave days entitled) × 100
Why it matters: Paradoxically, low leave usage is a bad sign. Employees not taking leave are burning out. Unused leave also accrues as a liability on your books.
Myanmar benchmark:
- Good: 70–85% of entitled leave used
- Alarm: under 50% (burnout risk, liability buildup)
9. Manager span of control
Formula: Direct reports per manager (average)
Why it matters: Too narrow (<4) means over-managing and high cost. Too wide (>12) means under-supporting and attrition risk.
Target: 6–8 for most professional roles; 10–15 for frontline factory supervision.
10. Compliance currency
Formula: Binary — are all statutory filings (SSB, PIT, labor returns) on time for the last 12 months? Yes or No.
Why it matters: A "No" here means you have real enforcement risk. This should always be green. If it's not, it's the first thing to fix.
The CEO HR dashboard (one page)
For a 200-person Myanmar business, the monthly dashboard should fit on one page:
| Metric | This month | Last month | 12-mo trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voluntary attrition (annualized) | 14% | 13% | ↗ |
| Regrettable attrition % | 35% | 32% | ↗ |
| 90-day new hire retention | 88% | 91% | ↘ |
| Time to hire (days) | 38 | 42 | ↘ |
| Offer acceptance | 82% | 79% | ↗ |
| Payroll error rate | 0.1% | 0.3% | ↘ |
| OT as % of base | 12% | 11% | ↗ |
| Leave utilization | 74% | 73% | → |
| Manager span (avg) | 7 | 7 | → |
| Compliance currency | ✅ | ✅ | → |
Reading it: 3 of the 10 are trending wrong (attrition, regrettable attrition, OT%). That's a CEO conversation, not an HR conversation.
How to build the dashboard in one week
- Day 1: Agree on the 10 metrics with CEO and Finance.
- Day 2: Export source data from payroll/HR system (if you have QHRM, it's one click; if Excel, consolidate).
- Day 3: Build the baseline — last 12 months.
- Day 4–5: Review with CEO. Agree thresholds.
- Week 2 onwards: Monthly refresh, 30 minutes.
The 3 traps to avoid
- Too many metrics. A 40-KPI HR scorecard gets read by no one. Ten is the maximum a CEO will engage with.
- Wrong benchmarks. Global benchmarks don't apply to Myanmar. Use Myanmar-specific ranges from local HR benchmark reports or from QHRM's customer anonymized data.
- Metrics without context. "Attrition is 22%" is useless. "Attrition is 22%, up from 14% last year, driven by the sales team where we had a manager change in September" is actionable.
How QHRM surfaces these metrics
- Built-in CEO dashboard with all 10 metrics, refreshed daily
- Drill-down — click any number to see the underlying list (e.g. who are the 12 leavers this quarter)
- Alerts when a metric crosses threshold (e.g. attrition passes 18%)
- Export to PDF for monthly board pack
- Multi-entity rollup for group-level CEO view across all subsidiaries
📥 Also free: CEO HR Dashboard Template (Excel) — ready-to-fill template of the 10 metrics above.
Frequently asked questions
Q: We're 40 people. Do we really need 10 metrics? Scale down to the top 5: voluntary attrition, 90-day retention, time to hire, payroll error rate, compliance currency. Add the rest as you grow past 100.
Q: Our CEO says "show me productivity per head." Why isn't that on the list? Productivity per head (revenue or output per FTE) is a business metric, not an HR metric. Track it, but HR doesn't own the inputs. HR owns the 10 here because HR can move them.
Q: Where do I get Myanmar-specific benchmarks? Commercial HR benchmark reports from local consultancies (Roland Berger, Frontier Myanmar Research, Myanmar Marketing Research) publish periodic surveys. QHRM's anonymized customer data is another reference point — ask your QHRM rep.
Q: How often should these metrics refresh? Monthly for most. Payroll error rate and compliance should be continuous (alert-based). Time to hire and attrition should be 12-month trailing, not month snapshots.
Next steps
We publish practical, legally-grounded HR guidance for Myanmar employers. Each piece is reviewed by our compliance team against current MLIP and Labor Law requirements.