Logan McNeil, a senior HRIS analyst at a mid-market company, is preparing for a Friday meeting with the CHRO and the VP of HR. The CHRO has asked for a turnover dashboard to be ready in six weeks. The ask is clear, but the definition of turnover isn’t. Operations counts it one way for their reports. Finance defines it differently for headcount planning. Talent uses a third version for attrition forecasting. The BI team is starting to scope the build. Logan submitted this intake.
Frame
The dashboard ask is clear, but the decision underneath it isn’t. Three teams already define turnover in three different ways for their own purposes, and nobody has been asked to settle which definition the org actually wants. Without that, the dashboard will get built against an assumed definition and start the same fight six weeks from now in a room full of more people.
What's happening (plain English)
The real issue isn’t whether to build the dashboard. The real issue is that turnover means four different things in your organization right now, and the dashboard is going to bake one of those definitions into the way leadership sees the workforce. That’s a bigger decision than a dashboard spec. It’s a decision about whose definition becomes the company’s definition. And it’s not Logan’s call to make alone.
Email-ready
Sent to the CHRO, with VP of HR cc’d.
Hi [CHRO name],
Before Friday I wanted to flag something I think is worth a few minutes of the meeting. The dashboard ask is clear, and the BI team is ready to start scoping. The piece I want to make sure we land on first is the definition of turnover itself.
Right now, three teams are using three different definitions for their own work. Operations counts contractors and internal transfers. Finance excludes both. Talent uses a separate definition for first 90 day attrition. Whichever definition the dashboard uses will effectively become the company’s official answer, and the teams using the other versions will need to either align or maintain a parallel view.
I don’t think this is a hard call to make, but I want to make sure it’s made rather than defaulted into. Could we spend the first ten minutes on Friday agreeing on the definition we want the dashboard to reflect, and who owns it going forward? That’ll let me give the BI team a clean spec instead of a spec that gets revised three times after launch.
Happy to bring a one-page summary of the three current definitions if that would help. Just let me know.
Thanks,
Logan
One next useful move
Send the email above to the CHRO before end of day Wednesday, with the VP of HR cc’d. The goal isn’t to delay Friday’s meeting. It’s to put the definition question on the table before the meeting starts, so that ten minutes of the agenda can be reserved for it. If the CHRO writes back saying “good catch, let’s talk about it Friday,” the meeting becomes about the right thing. If the CHRO writes back saying “just use the operations definition,” that’s also a clear answer and the spec can move forward. Either response is better than the meeting going forward without the question being asked.
Direct and gentler versions of the same message also included in the full Insight. So is the editorial commentary from me about why this specific framing works for this specific situation.