Ask most MSME owners what their HR & Admin manager’s KRAs are, and you’ll get one of two answers: a vague list (“employee coordination,” “office management,” “smooth functioning”) or silence. It’s the role every other department’s KRA sheet assumes will just work — payroll runs, compliance gets filed, the office doesn’t fall apart — and precisely because of that, it’s usually the last role to get a real KRA sheet at all.
That’s a mistake. An HR & Admin manager who knows exactly what they’re measured on behaves differently than one working off a job description and goodwill. This article covers a KRA framework for the role that’s actually measurable, drawn from the same KRA and KPI design work behind the downloadable KRA template on this site.
Why this role resists measurement
Most operational roles produce something countable: units welded, calls made, invoices collected. HR & Admin work is different — it’s mostly prevention and process. When it’s working, nothing visibly happens: no compliance notice arrives, no employee walks out over an unresolved grievance, no vendor payment is late. That absence of visible failure is exactly what makes owners default to vague KRAs — “keep things running smoothly” isn’t measurable, so it isn’t managed.
The fix isn’t to invent busywork metrics. It’s to measure the process on a timeline, and measure the failures that do happen.
A KRA framework that actually measures the role
Six result areas cover most of what an HR & Admin manager in a 30–300 person Indian manufacturing or trading company is actually responsible for:
| Result area | Indicator | Target (starting point) | Data source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statutory & compliance filing | PF/ESI/PT filings completed on or before due date | 100% on-time, zero notices | Filing acknowledgements, compliance calendar |
| Onboarding turnaround | Days from offer acceptance to full documentation + induction complete | ≤ 3 working days | Onboarding checklist log |
| Exit process discipline | Full & final settlement completed within policy window | ≤ 15 days from last working day | F&F register |
| Grievance/dispute turnaround | Days from a grievance being raised to first documented response | ≤ 2 working days | Grievance log |
| Early attrition | Voluntary exits within first 90 days, as % of new joiners | Track quarterly, set a reduction target after baseline | HRMS or manual joiner/leaver register |
| Admin cost discipline | Variance of admin/facility spend against approved budget | Within 5% of budget | Admin expense sheet vs. budget |
Five or six result areas is enough. Adding more doesn’t make the role more accountable — it just makes the sheet harder to review, and a KRA sheet nobody reviews is a KRA sheet nobody follows. This is the same “source of data” discipline built into the KRA template: every result area above has an existing record behind it, not a new form someone has to remember to fill in.
A note on the compliance KRAs
Compliance result areas look binary — filed on time or not — which makes owners assume they don’t need targets. They still need one, because “handled compliance” without a due-date target is unmeasurable after the fact. A missed PF filing three months ago is invisible unless the target and the filing date are both on record.
What not to measure
A few KRAs show up on HR & Admin sheets that look reasonable and aren’t:
- “Employee satisfaction” without naming the measurement method. If there’s no survey instrument and no cadence, this isn’t a KRA — it’s a hope.
- “Number of meetings attended” or “coordination with departments.” Activity counts, not results. A manager can attend every meeting and still let onboarding slip.
- Attrition as a single blended number. Total attrition mixes voluntary exits, terminations, and retirements into one figure that tells you nothing about what the HR manager can actually influence. Early voluntary attrition (above) is the number that reflects onboarding and culture quality.
How to phase this in
Start with the compliance and onboarding/exit KRAs — they’re the easiest to baseline because the records already exist. Add the grievance-turnaround and attrition KRAs once a quarter of baseline data exists to set a realistic target against, rather than guessing a number that turns out to be either trivial or impossible. Review the sheet on the same cadence as every other role’s — a separate review calendar for one role is how it quietly stops being reviewed.
If your company is also working through why performance appraisals stall out generally, this role is a good one to pilot a revised review process on: the data sources above are mostly things that already exist in registers and logs, so it’s a low-friction place to test a review cadence before rolling it out company-wide.
FAQ
What’s the difference between a KRA and a job description for an HR & Admin manager?
A job description lists duties — “manage payroll,” “handle recruitment.” A KRA states what’s measured and what target defines success for each duty, like “PF/ESI filed by the statutory due date, 100% of the time.” The job description tells someone what to do; the KRA tells them how they’ll know they did it well.
How many KRAs should an HR & Admin manager have?
Five to six is the practical range for this role. Fewer than that misses real accountability areas; more than that turns the review into a checklist nobody actually reads before signing.
Can compliance KRAs really be measured if nothing goes wrong most of the time?
Yes — measure the process, not just the failure. “Filed by the due date, every time” is measurable every single cycle, whether or not a compliance notice ever actually arrives. Waiting for a failure to have something to measure is why compliance KRAs get skipped.
What if the company doesn’t have HRMS software to track onboarding or attrition data?
None of the data sources above require software — a dated onboarding checklist, a grievance register, and a joiner/leaver spreadsheet are enough to start. HRMS makes it faster to pull, not possible to track; most MSMEs already keep these records somewhere, just not in one place.
How often should these KRAs be reviewed?
Quarterly at minimum, aligned to whatever review cycle the rest of the company uses. Compliance and onboarding KRAs can be checked monthly since the data is usually already logged that frequently.
Setting KRAs for a role like this is easier with a starting template than a blank page. The downloadable KRA template includes a working HR and Admin Manager sheet with these result areas pre-filled — adapt the targets to your own baseline. For a fuller KRA/KPI design across every role in the company, or a structured performance management engagement, get in touch.
By Dr. Babu Balakrishnan — management consultant and HR practitioner. Discuss your scope.