HR KPI for News and Mass Media

Without any doubt we are living in the age of information. News is all around us. Every morning people read newspapers and visit web pages of most popular online news agencies. There is a very high competition in mass media business. Everyone tries to be the first to deliver news to people. This contributes to popularity of periodicals, newspapers, magazines and online media. The more people are reading newspaper the more they charge for advertising, and in fact this is how modern mass media survive. Mass media sell news which customers buy, but they make most of the profits through advertising. That’s why every newspaper or magazine should spend money in a very reasonable and economic way. This especially concerns human resource departments of major news agencies. HR department does not produce anything, but only organizes work of personnel in an efficient way. If human resource managers failed to reach their goals the company may suffer sufficient losses. In fact, human resource department is one of the most important and mass media. What is a newspaper? These are journalists, reporters and editors. If a newspaper failed to be the best and to have its regular target audience it won’t survive. That’s why it is very important to hire the best professionals in mass media industry and create suitable working conditions for them. At the same time, human resource department must make sure that every dollar is spent efficiently.

For this reason evaluation of HR performance in mass media is an important element business management system and strategic goals implementation plan. The more efficiently personnel works, the better are the results and potential revenues. Balanced Scorecard is highly recommended to be used for performance evaluation purposes in mass media. It will not only measure current performance but also indicate progress of human resource department in terms of implementation of strategic goals. Evaluation process is triggered by key performance indicators which show company progress of regress against set goals and objectives. It should be mentioned that key performance indicators differ from industry to industry and mass media is not an exception here. Let’s review several key performance indicators characteristic of mass media HR BSC.

As known, many journalists are working part time or teleworking. This saves company money and enabled top management and human resource department to offer better salaries to such journalists and reporters. Managers satisfaction with teleworking is one of the widely used indicators in human resource evaluation in mass media. Indeed, is not easy to work if an employee as far away but not in the office. If managers are not happy with such type a work it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect great outcomes. That’s why it is important to measure managers satisfaction with teleworking. On the other hand, there are journalists who was still working and their satisfaction rate have to be assessed as well. If both parties are happy with cooperation, both managers and employees will show their top performance. It is also important to evaluate such a key performance indicator as average travel costs per employee since journalists are traveling a lot.