Why Should Employees Be "Cost"?

　　管理者都喜欢说“员工是我们最宝贵的资产”。然而，说归说，很多人仍将员工当做成本来管理。这种做法非常危险，因为对许多组织而言，员工是长期竞争优势的唯一来源。公司如果不在员工身上投资，不仅业绩会受损，甚至连生存都会受到威胁。

Why should employees be "cost"?

Many enterprises still regard employees as costs, to a certain extent, because they have been unable to find effective ways to measure the contribution of human capital management to profits.

This refers to human capital management, including leadership development, job design, and knowledge sharing.

Happily, they now have a way to do so.

In the past ten years, we have developed a human capital management evaluation system.

This system can help organizations predict performance, determine the best areas of personnel investment, and correctly understand the long-term value of investment in human capital.

When constructing this system, the first thing is to determine which human capital management factors play a decisive role in organizational performance.

Through empirical research, we find that the core driving factors of human capital management that can predict organizational performance include five categories: leadership, employee work arrangement, knowledge accessibility, staff optimization and organizational learning ability.

Each class can be subdivided into at least four minor terms.

For example, leadership includes management communication, participation, management skills, executive skills, leadership development, and succession planning.

Next, we take the form of questionnaire to evaluate the practice of these five aspects, so as to judge the level of human capital management ability, identify the advantages and disadvantages of human capital management, and find out the relationship between the progress or regression of human capital management practice and the improvement or insufficiency of organizational performance.

In the assessment, we used 1~5 points to evaluate the maturity of each practice.

For example, in terms of executive skills, 1 points mean poor performance, i.e. low maturity; 5 points to good performance, i.e. high maturity.

Therefore, by comparing the maturity of several surveys before and after, we can find out the progress or retrogression of each practice, so as to identify improvement priorities and directly promote performance improvement.

　　新人力资本评估体系

Over the past five years, we have applied this tool to help 42 organizations improve their performance.

For example, it guides American Standard Companies to increase sales revenue and improve plant safety management.

It also helped Beaufort County School District of South Carolina find the roots of poor student achievement and improved student achievement.

In addition, we tracked 11 Financial Services Company and found that the higher the maturity of human capital management, the higher the returns of their stocks in the next year.

No matter what kind of organization you are in, you can use this framework for self diagnosis and improvement.

It should be noted that human capital management factors that affect performance will change as the organization and its environment change.

Therefore, it is very important to regularly measure and adjust human capital management practices and to identify their links with organizational performance.

To carry out this analysis, you need to collect two types of data: the quantitative value of human capital management performance collected by staff and management, and the quantitative value of organizational performance.

There are three steps to data collection and analysis:

1. investigate employees and managers to quantify the differences in human capital management maturity between various functions, business units, regions and jobs, and record the strengths and weaknesses of the organization in human capital management.

2. find out the relationship between the maturity of human capital management and key organizational performance (which can be financial or non-financial).

The purpose of this step is to determine which human capital management factors are most important to organizational performance.

3. use the findings of the first two steps to identify human capital management factors that can significantly improve organizational performance and need to be improved.

This step helps organizations identify the focus of human capital management and development.

　　根据自评结果和文中提供的对照表，你就可以判断所在组织的人力资本管理的成败优劣，并有的放矢地予以改进，让人力资本投资的回报最大化。