People Analytics Traffic Lightning

Learn how to Highlight metric performance by applying traffic colors to your visual.

Traffic lighting is a monitoring system that uses the colors red, amber, and green to indicate the performance of a metric against set targets. You set targets by applying simple conditional formatting rules to the chart so that the metric appears:

  • Green to indicate good performance, the metric is on or above target.
  • Amber to indicate concerning performance, the metric is off target but in an acceptable range.
  • Red to indicate bad performance, the metric is off target and in a range that requires attention.

Add traffic lighting to your charts to show how your company is performing and immediately identify where you need to focus your review.

For example, the following illustration shows a Breakdown of Headcount grouped by Organization Hierarchy. To monitor the performance of the Headcount metric, the following traffic lighting rules were applied:

  1. Metric value is greater than 500, traffic light as Good.
  2. Metric value is greater than or equal to 250, traffic light as Concerning.
  3. Metric value is less than 250, traffic light as Bad.

Traffic lighting rules can be set by comparing a metric to one of the following:

Note: The examples in the following table build off the previous example where traffic lighting is being applied to a Breakdown of Headcount by Organization Hierarchy. In this example, the visual items consist of the groupings: Operations, Sales, Finance, and more.

ExampleRule type - Description

  • Metric Value - The metric value for each visual item is compared to a target value. Rule: If the metric value is less than 250, traffic light as Bad and visual item will be highlighted in red.
  • Change in metric value - The metric value for each visual item in the selected time period is compared to the metric value from a previous time period. Rule: If the change from February 2020 is less than 5%, traffic light as Good and visual item will be highlighted in green.
  • Difference from group - The metric value for each visual item is compared to the metric value of another population. Rule: If the difference from Women is greater than 20%, traffic light as Bad and visual item will be highlighted in red.
  • Difference from another metric - The metric value for each visual item is compared to another metric. Rule: If the difference from Employee Exit Count is greater than 500%, traffic light as Bad and visual item will be highlighted in red.
  • Difference from metric overall The metric value for each visual item is compared to the overall value of another metric. Rule: If the difference from Employee Exit Count is greater than 200%, traffic light as Concerning and the visual item will be highlighted in amber.

Traffic lighting can be added to the following visual types:

  • Breakdown
  • Trend (with no groupings)
  • Trend breakdown (with no groupings)
  • Table (with one metric)

To add traffic lighting to your visual, click the Traffic light button (!) on the Visual Actions menu.

How traffic lighting rules are evaluated

The traffic lighting rules are evaluated in the order they appear in the Info panel from top to bottom. Once a rule is met, the remaining rules are not evaluated.

For example, you applied the following traffic lighting rules to the Breakdown of Headcount grouped by Organization Hierarchy:

  1. Metric value is greater than or equal to 250. Traffic light as Concerning.
  2. Metric value is greater than 500. Traffic light as Good.
  3. Metric value is less than 250. Traffic light as Bad.

As shown in the following illustration, the headcount for Operations is 550 and its metric value is highlighted as concerning (amber) and not good (green).

In this case, the headcount for Operations meets the first condition, so the remaining rules are not evaluated.



Still need our help? Our support team is waiting to help you. Contact us